Obama More Cowardly Than Carter?

Retarded Jimmy was so inept in his foreign policy that the USSR decided to invade Afghanistan in 1979---my friend Amb. Spike Dubs was just one of millions of casualties of that war. And of course, Jimmy didn't even bleat when the Russian Military Intell thugs killed the American Ambassador in the US Embassy. Nothing to see here, just move along.....

Now we have a complete misfit in the White House who is a total neophyte in the foreign policy arena, aside from a senior thesis he wrote at Columbia U. on US/USSR nuclear disarmament which has mysteriously "disappeared" without a bleat from the impotent White House Choir called the MSM. Or as Charles Krauthammer notes in a [partial] laundry list of US stupidities committed under the man-child's incompetent miscalculations:

...rising powers, traditional American allies, having watched this administration in action, have decided that there's no cost in lining up with America's enemies and no profit in lining up with a U.S. president given to apologies and appeasement.

They've watched President Obama's humiliating attempts to appease Iran, as every rejected overture is met with abjectly renewed U.S. negotiating offers. American acquiescence reached such a point that the president was late, hesitant and flaccid in expressing even rhetorical support for democracy demonstrators who were being brutally suppressed and whose call for regime change offered the potential for the most significant U.S. strategic advance in the region in 30 years.

They've watched America acquiesce to Russia's re-exerting sway over Eastern Europe, over Ukraine (pressured by Russia last month into extending for 25 years its lease of the Black Sea naval base at Sevastopol) and over Georgia (Russia's de facto annexation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia is no longer an issue under the Obama "reset" policy).

They've watched our appeasement of Syria, Iran's agent in the Arab Levant -- sending our ambassador back to Syria even as it tightens its grip on Lebanon, supplies Hezbollah with Scuds and intensifies its role as the pivot of the Iran-Hezbollah-Hamas alliance. The price for this ostentatious flouting of the United States and its interests? Ever more eager U.S. "engagement."

They've observed the administration's gratuitous slap at Britain over the Falklands, its contemptuous treatment of Israel, its undercutting of the Czech Republic and Poland, and its indifference to Lebanon and Georgia. And in Latin America, they see not just U.S. passivity as Venezuela's Hugo Chávez organizes his anti-American "Bolivarian" coalition while deepening military and commercial ties with Iran and Russia. They saw active U.S. support in Honduras for a pro-Chávez would-be dictator seeking unconstitutional powers in defiance of the democratic institutions of that country.

Krauthammer wrote the column in response to Brazil and Turkey's agreement with Iran on Uranium---which the US under Obama/Clinton's leadership thought was a clever ploy to divert some of Iran's uranium out of country---until the final agreement actually ended up increasing the weapons-grade potential of the uranium in question. It's pretty easy to gull a sophomoric foreign policy invisible boy who doesn't give press conferences any more because he can't take questions without a teleprompter. And, as CK notes, the new agreement

will, however, make meaningful sanctions more difficult. America's proposed Security Council resolution is already laughably weak -- no blacklisting of Iran's central bank, no sanctions against Iran's oil and gas industry, no nonconsensual inspections on the high seas. Yet Turkey and Brazil -- both current members of the Security Council -- are so opposed to sanctions that they will not even discuss the resolution. And China will now have a new excuse to weaken it further.

But the Secretary of State who brought a "reset button" to Moscow that was inaccurate in its translation can't be expected to get something as complex as Iranian nuclear sanctions straight. And CK correctly sees the result

This is not just an America in decline. This is an America in retreat -- accepting, ratifying and declaring its decline, and inviting rising powers to fill the vacuum.

Nor is this retreat by inadvertence. This is retreat by design and, indeed, on principle. It's the perfect fulfillment of Obama's adopted Third World narrative of American misdeeds, disrespect and domination from which he has come to redeem us and the world. Hence his foundational declaration at the U.N. General Assembly last September that "No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation" (guess who's been the dominant nation for the last two decades?) and his dismissal of any "world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another." (NATO? The West?)

Given Obama's policies and principles, Turkey and Brazil are acting rationally. Why not give cover to Ahmadinejad and his nuclear ambitions? As the United States retreats in the face of Iran, China, Russia and Venezuela, why not hedge your bets? There's nothing to fear from Obama, and everything to gain by ingratiating yourself with America's rising adversaries. After all, they actually believe in helping one's friends and punishing one's enemies.

So Obama may be deliberately inserting his own racial hatred onto the USA, although his own ancestors were slave-owning Kansas settlers on his mother's side and possibly Arab Somali slavers [slave-hunting Africans organized by the Arabs] on his father's side.

Personally, I'll just settle for barnyard-variety egomaniac punching several levels above his weight.

Should California Boycott Itself

My Dirty Little Secret

Ed Morrissey found someone sleuthed out the dirty little secret Barbara Boxer and Nancy Botox have been hiding all these days. Section 834b in the California Penal Code is the law of the lotus-eating, ganja-smoking regressives that populate CA:

(a) Every law enforcement agency in California shall fully cooperate with the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service regarding any person who is arrested if he or she is suspected of being present in the United States in violation of federal immigration laws. (b) With respect to any such person who is arrested, and suspected of being present in the United States in violation of federal immigration laws, every law enforcement agency shall do the following: (1) Attempt to verify the legal status of such person as a citizen of the United States, an alien lawfully admitted as a permanent resident, an alien lawfully admitted for a temporary period of time or as an alien who is present in the United States in violation of immigration laws. The verification process may include, but shall not be limited to, questioning the person regarding his or her date and place of birth, and entry into the United States, and demanding documentation to indicate his or her legal status. (2) Notify the person of his or her apparent status as an alien who is present in the United States in violation of federal immigration laws and inform him or her that, apart from any criminal justice proceedings, he or she must either obtain legal status or leave the United States. (3) Notify the Attorney General of California and the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service of the apparent illegal status and provide any additional information that may be requested by any other public entity. (c) Any legislative, administrative, or other action by a city, county, or other legally authorized local governmental entity with jurisdictional boundaries, or by a law enforcement agency, to prevent or limit the cooperation required by subdivision (a) is expressly prohibited.

That's state law, as is the law against illegal drugs. But in la-la-land, only politically correct rules are enforced. And they have nothing to do with the law.

Man-Child Suckered Again As Feckless Obama Gets Blind-sided by Brazil

Is it any surprise that Obama was bamboozled by Brazil, a country that surpasses the US by far in corruption and misgovernment? While Obama played patty-cake with Iran's corrupt theocracy, desperately believing his own mojo voodoo diplomacy would woo the Iranian terror-state into giving up the bomb, a crackpot named Lula steals the prize---promising Iran plenty plus a vote on the Security Council where the soccer power has a temporary seat.

But Obama's solipcisms die hard and he still thinks that playing nice with American enemies, while bashing its allies like Israel, Poland, Honduras and Australia, will get him chits in the world-wide poker game he thinks he's playing. Jennifer Rubin in Commentary reminds the Man-Child chosen-boy that it's chess the US is playing and being nice only uses up time before the move buzzer goes off.

R.I.P. American and Global Prosperity, as Predicted in 2007

Nassim Taleb is a Lebanese genius who is skeptical of the
"too big to fail" mentality and believes most intellectual elites, including the chattering-class mainstream-media morons who prattle their praises and adore these elites, are full of what he calls "scholarly-sounding verbiage AKA (b......t)." Here's why you don't see him on CNBC or the cable nightly nitwittery:

Taleb wrote that most people ignore consequential rare events that he calls "Black Swans" because we are more comfortable seeing the world as something structured, ordinary, and comprehensible. Taleb calls this blindness "the Platonic fallacy" and argues that it leads to three distortions:

Narrative fallacy: creating a story post-hoc so that an event will seem to have an identifiable cause,
Ludic fallacy: believing that the unstructured randomness found in life resembles the structured randomness found in games. ...
Statistical regress fallacy: believing that the structure of probability can be delivered from a set of data

.
He also believes that people are subject to the triplet of opacity, through which history is distilled even as current events are incomprehensible. The triplet of opacity consists of

an illusion of understanding of current events,
a retrospective distortion of historical events,
an overestimation of factual information, combined with an overvalue of the intellectual elite.

Taleb, an anti-Platonist, believes that universities are better at public relations and claiming credit than generating knowledge. Knowledge and technology are generated by what he calls "stochastic tinkering", rarely by top-down directed research.

The above is a summary of his writings in various areas. In 2007 he predicted the worldwide meltdown in The Black Swan:

Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while reducing volatility and giving the appearance of stability. In other words it creates devastating Black Swans. We have never lived before under the threat of a global collapse. Financial Institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks – when one fails, they all fall. The increased concentration among banks seems to have the effect of making financial crisis less likely, but when they happen they are more global in scale and hit us very hard. We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur ....I shiver at the thought.

The government-sponsored institution Fannie Mae, when I look at its risks, seems to be sitting on a barrel of dynamite, vulnerable to the slightest hiccup. But not to worry: their large staff of scientists deem these events "unlikely".

Nessim appears to be much like CK Prahalad, recently deceased management guru who started with a Jesuit education and:

after completing his BSc in Physics from Loyola College in Madras. One day, after noticing that many temporary workers were using old or torn gloves (managers gave out new gloves according to seniority), Prahalad argued for distributing new gloves to the workers who handled the most dangerous stuff instead. It was more a common sense than path-breaking thought but Prahalad's manager was impressed and began mentoring him by bringing him business books. Later CK called

the Union Carbide experience a "major inflection point" in his life where he "learned about the extraordinary wisdom of ordinary people."

.

Nessim Taleb also believes in the essential wisdom of what he calls "stochastic" and what I call "amateurish" tinkering. Remember an "amateur" does something for the love of it, not the esteem of his colleagues or end-of-the-rainbow profits. Prahalad ended up at my alma mater, the University of Michigan, where it is more often the flyover-country spirit of innovation rather than the quasi-marxist corruption of the two left coasts that motivates and inspires the inhabitants.

Obama Disses the Press on Freedom of Press Act Signing

What, me worry?

Chip Reid of
CBS whines that the Chosen Won

has not held a prime-time White House news conference in many months, despite much pleading from pundits and members of the media.

Helen Thomas has been heard in senile bleats to utter "since last July," so indeed it's running on ten months. Can you imagine the whining, bleating, and solipsistic ragings of a press under GWB had it waited so long for a press conference? The White House Press Corps has already been ditched by the dusky dude in order to watch "my daughter play soccer" in a place still undiscovered by the superSleuths who so readily accused Bush of three conspiracies before breakfast simply to get their adrenalin moving toward erasing the hangover from the previous night's wassail. Some choice comments:

Obama is the political love-child of:
Saul Alinsky (political deception);
Jeremiah Wright (hatred of whites and America);
Tony Rezko (political influence peddling), and;
William Ayers (hatred of the military and corporations).


sooo chip...are you wiping the sleep from your eyes and realizing that the country is headed off a cliff?? And it was the MEDIA that betrayed America....Chip, be brave...be part of the solution now...please.

How is all of that 'hope and change' working for you media??

Don't forget, he was your darling!

No surprise here since the leader of our country has deemed himself to be above questions. The press might as well get used to it....no matter how much they pander to him and worship him, he could care less about them.
On another note, Mr. Reid, since you are a journalist, you might try to work on your writing. "Recall that last Friday the president refused to take any questions after delivering his angry statement on the oil spill in the Rose Garden." The oil spill was not in the Rose Garden, it was in the Gulf. Stop murdering the English language.

All of you people criticizing The One are putting yourselves at risk of being detained and treated at an Obama Re-Education Camp.

Most all in the press have been his lapdogs and played a major role in getting him elected!

Could it be possible that some in the press are WAKING UP. . . . NAW!

Freedom of the Press, Yeah right. The press seem to be to stupid or blind to do there job. The Press has power but they have bowed the knee to the government (White House) and have sold themselves out. They don't report any more. Its more commentary on the topics they like, endorse or politically disagree with. But not free and objective. There just mouth pieces as propaganda machines (government)

Democrats Anticipate Losses and Celebrate by Circular Firing Squads

Karl Rove does an ample analysis of the punishment that the Democrats earned by their spurious legislation, including a healthcare monstrosity so inept and unexamined that it removed Congressional gold-plated platinum elitist health benefits without the ignorant Demonrats even noticing. Soon-to-be-Speaker Boehner was correct that the largely illiterate, almost completely innumerate congresscritters on the left side of the Chamber hadn't bothered to read their own bill. Dodissima Pelosi correctly said that after they pass the bill, the public will see what they got. And the public is not amused.

Self-castration is the insane response of the insane Democrat Party, with murderous primaries including one in Arkansas designed to bring down Sen. Blanche Lincoln and almost certainly hand the seat over to a Republican.

"Given the obsessive coverage of the Republican "civil war," you may not realize Democrats are also feuding. Angry and disappointed that their president and Congress has not done more, the party's liberal base is throwing itself into the primaries, pushing the party to the left even as the country moves right," says Kim Strassel of the WSJ.

The vicious thugs at Service Employees International Union and other socialist/communists have ponied up $3 million to defeat Lincoln in the primary with a neo-Stalinist named Halter. Ditto for a leftoid ditzmama named Colleen Hanabusa in Hawaii and Joe Sestak in PA, whom Obama tried to bribe with the Secretary of the Navy job, technically a felony, to stay out of the race against serial hack-rat [Specter was a Dem until 43 years ago when he switched to Repub, before re-ratting last year to the Dem side again, as Mark Shields helpfully pointed out in the PBS session with RINO David Brooks last night]. Ancient fossil Specter may squeak through, but Hanabusa has a snowball's chance in hell to get elected and the only beneficiary of her Communist agenda is a Republican named Charles Dijou, an almost certain winner today in Obama's home electoral CD.

Although Sestak would be worse news than Toomey, he would remove an unctuous elderly version of Upchuck Shumer from the Senate race, and that in itself would be a moral cleansing. All in all, the above machinations demonstrate again that the only people stupider than the individual Demonrat candidates themselves is the collective stupidity of the Demo-rat Party.

While the Joe Kleins and the Contessa Brewers of the deranged Mess-NBC wing of the media exult over Charlie Crist's defection from the Republicans, and Bennett's defenestration at the Utah Republican convention, the GOP can rest happy that Obama is sinking in the polls and the Dems will have a hard time keeping the House and even have an inside-straight chance to take over the Senate, should the cards fall just right and the Democrats continue their ruinous campaign for Crap and Trade and their opposition to an AZ law that 73% of Americans believe is just fine and 62% believe should be strengthened.

Meanwhile insane asylums like Chicago, Los Angeles, and Boulder CO want to "punish" Arizona by depriving them of their commerce! Why doesn't LA offer to accept AZ's unwanted illegal aliens and pay for Arizona's ethnic cleansing of these scofflaws to remove them to Hollyweird and environs?

That would be a fitting migration of moral lepers to a certifiable leper colony!

UPDATE Michael Barone weighs in at the Wall Street Journal this morning. He notes that Repub incumbents are hit from the right and Dem incumbents from the left. Polarization continues apace and accelerates.

How many overdogs are in trouble? Probably more than those who currently think so. Democratic Sens. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas are facing serious opposition from incumbents in their primaries next Tuesday. So is John McCain, who has until August 24 to sway Arizona Republicans. Stay tuned.

Guttersnipe POLITICO calls Tea Party Activists "bigots"

Dark Side of Conservatism is how a perfesser calls the Tea Party activists, comparing them with other populists unfavorably and simply making a hash of any rational argument against the conservative right.

Hilarious BS from a leftoid crank who won a leftoid history prize for writing on populists.

"

But historically, whether it was the JBS or Goldwater, the radical right has often had a soft spot for bigots." is a sentence which pseudo-historians and agitprop leftoid columnists use to tar with the same brush, implying that the Tea Partiers are bigots because "the radical right has often had a soft spot for bigots." The syllogism is as incorrect as Postel is dishonest, which is completely. The same syllogism could be reversed and the words "radical left" and "terrorist attacks on government buildings" with equal validity. William Ayers, who stains the latest New Yorker with an apology for terrorists is a perfect example of the old Marxist maxim "No Fault on the Left."

Another egregious solecism committed by this San Fran State radical-left "historian" is when he says that the so-called "radical right...have feared that their freedom will be lost if the government extends a hand to the have-nots and the unprotected" in an attempt to brand them as red-lining the "poor."
TEA stands for "Taxed Enough Already" and a third-rate scribbler/agitpreppie like Postel ignores the fact that the Tea Partiers are against Big Government's taking over the entire economy and taxing the hard-working tax payers much more than previously under the man-child "community organizer" screwing up the economy at the moment.

Postel is what used to be called a "guttersnipe" or "Yellow Journalist" whose writings have no end other than to promote a dishonest and illogical political agenda. The US is indeed heading rapidly toward Greece's situation with the encouragement of know-nothings like Postel.
And California is the 51st state, counting the District of Columbia, in terms of deficit overruns and sheer political spendthrifts ruining a state's economy. No wonder 1.5 million people have left CA since 2008. Even the illegal immigrants desert a sinking ship when they see they're on one!

Comment or Rant: You be the Judge!

Spurred on by more lies from Barry, the Community Organizer [whose job with ACORN concerned red-lining, BTW], I commented with some heat and perhaps light on the irony of this man-child's hubris---which will soon be repaid handsomely in the 2010 preliminary bouts.

Obama can keep inventing his own facts on who drove the car into the ditch, but it was the Community Reinvestment Act that Carter started, Clinton revived, that not only eliminated red-lining, but forced banks to make loans based on bad business practices to low-income, bad credit-risk clients. Now Detroit is destroying 10,000 homes and paving over lots where family houses used to stand----some "Community Reinvestment" that was. Bush tried in his feckless fashion to turn around the CRA insanity, but FannyMae/FMac was the supposed unsinkable mortgage buyer of last resort. Run by Dems like Jamie Gorelick and other Dem hacks who previously were part of the problem and got paid close to NINE FIGURE BONUSES for running the agencies into the ground. Gorelick is a lawyer who never ran a thing except billable-hours sheets. Finally, with the assistance of Queen Barney and Duplicitous Dodd, the whole house of cards collapsed in 2007 and the Dems immediately blamed the Bush Administration, which arguably was incompetent and under-motivated to take on the Dem barons and its own RINO kingpins to roll back the CRA madness.

Now the Obama regime claims the Republicans caused the collapse. Just like Bush was responsible for 9/11 after 8 years of Clinton's slacking off on anti-terrorism after the '93 WTC bombings and Gorelick's hamstringing the FBI/CIA cooperation on anti-terrorists with a "firewall" that ironically allowed the 9/11 perps to get in-country. Gorelick should be tried on two counts of treason and made to return the umpty-million dollar bonuses she scored at FanFred.

And Obama should STFU.

Them's my ardent sentiments and I ain't gonna change 'em!

The Mess the US is in today

The Telegraph has an article entitled "US faces same problems as Greece, says Bank of England" which then quotes a certain Mr. King who fingerpoints and kvetches about the Deficit Bomb.

A commenter named Henry Cave Devine made the following observation, excerpted from a longer "j'accuse" panorama:

[

Consider] the mess in the US: it is much larger than the Greek disaster, riddled with corruption, lies, pretense, political deception, self-serving Congresssional leadership and a moronic and deceptive White House during the Bush administration and for at least a decade before. The US public opinion polls show that 70+% of the public believe the US is still in a recession, 80+% lack confidence in that nation’s leadership and 50+% place blame on the current White House.
Consider where America is today: severe unemployment problems with grim prospects for substantive change; two losing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan at massive financial and human-life cost; near-meaningless overblown legislation for healthcare and financial services regulation that miss all the key concerns/problems of the system and play right into the hands of the worst greed in America; systemic debt problems from on top at the government level right down to the mortgage and credit card burdens at the individual level… bombs that have still not completely exploded; an emergent domestic terrrorism problem with no meaningful safeguards over decades and not much better protections now nor on the horizon; and worst of all an arrogant sense of massive entitlement to a “good life without earning it”, which is killing America, the global capital of obesity, sloth and insularity.

I think HCD overdoes it with the final three, as "sloth" doesn't characterize the manic disposition of most Americans and they certainly WORK harder than most Eurotards, who are generally slackers compared to Americans with a job. But obesity and insularity are two very bad traits that the US should own up to, and fast food is really one letter away from its true nature: "fat food."

Congress Wants to Speed Up Deficit Spending to Catch Up to Greece

Congresscritters on the Left are watching the clock run out on their temporary majorities and are looking to INCREASE deficits, all the while blaming Republicans because Bush's Administration did the same thing! Sound like playground macho to you, too?

Democratic leaders are looking in the next three weeks to send President Barack Obama a slew of measures that cost more than $200 billion, including a multiyear extension of unemployment benefits, an extension of expiring tax provisions and Medicare doctor payments totaling $180 billion and a $33 billion Afghanistan war supplemental bill.....GOP members are banking on deficits being one of the biggest issues in November. This year’s budget shortfall is expected to be $1.5 trillion, and deficits are expected to average $1 trillion over the next decade, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates of Obama’s budget proposal.

The rhetoric on both sides is heating up:

“Washington Democrats’ out-of-control spending spree is scaring the hell out of the American people,” said Michael Steel, a spokesman for House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio). “It has to stop.”

To which the Democrats respond with their standard class-warfare Marxist line, using MC Hammer as an example???:

“As much as [Republicans] would like you to forget, they passed an agenda that benefited big corporate special interests and the wealthy at the expense of middle-class families and then turned around and left our grandkids with the bill,” said Doug Thornell, a spokesman for Assistant to the Speaker Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.). “Democrats inherited an economic disaster from a party who had about as much fiscal responsibility as MC Hammer. We have taken responsible steps to clean up their mess. It’d be nice if Republicans reined in their political ambitions, grabbed a mop and joined us.”

And it looks like Greece will be a poster-boy for the ObamaCare Health Fiasco that nobody in Congress read before they voted on it, as well as other Dem boondoggles like the Crap and Trade Bill, among others in queue to make the US bankrupt:

Republican senators, first led by Sen. Jim Bunning (Ky.) and subsequently by Sen. Tom Coburn (Okla.), have held up the Democrats’ past attempts to hold quick votes on extending the unemployment benefits and other expiring tax provisions.

Coburn, who has noted that Democrats approved $173 billion in deficit spending since the pay-go law was signed by Obama in March, has said he would also oppose any of the coming measures, including the war supplemental, that aren’t paid for.

“Dr. Coburn will use every tool at his disposal to force Congress to pay for these provisions,” said Coburn spokesman John Hart. “Our country is headed toward a Greek-like collapse because Congress refuses to make hard choices.”

California is the best example stateside of how Democrats destroy an economy by taxes and gigantic entitlements for public employees while grinding the small-business types into the ground or driving them out of state---California has lost 1.5 million people since 2008. The Dems also want to depopulate the USA, it seems, with abortions at one end, death panels at the other end, and in-between, onerous taxation which drives corporations offshore and eventually a lot of their employees.

California is the American Greece?

URKEL from Austria

Lazy shiftless slackers like Schwartzenegger are one of the reasons Texas is overtaking California in economic productivity. 1.5 million people have left CA since Obama was elected while 848,000 have entered Texas during the same period. Schwartzenegger was disgracing himself giving a commencement speech making inaccurate jokes about Arizona while his state rotted on the vine. Here's "Hit and Run":

Lest anti-Greek bias rear its ugly head, note that you can get a subpar workforce right here in these United States. In Chief Executive magazine's annual survey of "Best and Worst States for Business," California workers scored a gentleman's B-, helping the Golden State come in 51st place out of the 50 states. (District of Columbia is included in the rankings.)

Chief Executive's survey of business owners tabulates the tax and regulatory environment, the quality of the workforce and the state's living environment. There are actually quite a few states with less appealing workers than California's, but the state's high taxes and heavy regulation give it the only F on the list. The Orange County Register explains:

It doesn't take a national survey to reveal California's failing business climate. Seven California metro areas were among the 15 national leaders in commercial bankruptcy filings in 2009, according to Equifax Inc. Not coincidentally, California had twice as many personal bankruptcies as any other state in 2009 when it ranked 11th in bankruptcies per capita.

It also doesn't take a CEO to notice the differences between California and top-rated Texas. Texas, with nearly as many residents and the world's 12th largest economy, "is where 70 percent of all new U.S. jobs have been created since 2008," the magazine reported. Also unsurprisingly, Texas gained more than 848,000 net residents based on migration in and out of the state in the past decade, while California lost 1.5 million, according to the Census.

Must be all those ganja shops in LA dispensing dope with a doc's prescription or maybe the porn industry has sapped the vital juices out of much of the CA work force!?!

The insidious thing about an unfriendly business climate is that it takes a long time for the effects to show up in the government's inability to pay its bills. So long, in fact, that when the sovereign bankruptcy comes, it's easy to draw the conclusion that tax rates are too low. Both California and Greece are going through a variety of this type of denial right now. But with the governor of California and the prime minister of Greece both promising to turn over a new leaf, this is a good time to remember that you can't take people's money if you prevent them from making money in the first place.

California's been having a party blow out since Clinton came to LA to help CALPERS erect a pension system that beggars the future of the Golden Staters from here to eternity [all the while harvesting those BJ's he lied under oath about!]. California was what Philip K Dick saw in his crystal-meth ball and wrote about before he croaked. Sin City and Screw the Farmers and their scary work ethic!

The Left Coast Sucks.

Welfare State Spends Other Peoples' Money Until Everyone's Broke

Robert J. Samuelson of the Washington Post has this sobering thought in "The Welfare State's Death Spiral":

What we're seeing in Greece is the death spiral of the welfare state. This isn't Greece's problem alone, and that's why its crisis has rattled global stock markets and threatens economic recovery. Virtually every advanced nation, including the United States, faces the same prospect. Aging populations have been promised huge health and retirement benefits, which countries haven't fully covered with taxes. The reckoning has arrived in Greece, but it awaits most wealthy societies.

As Margaret Thatcher famously noted: "Socialism works until the state runs out of other people's money."

Americans dislike the term "welfare state" and substitute the bland word "entitlements." Vocabulary doesn't alter the reality. Countries cannot overspend and overborrow forever. By delaying hard decisions about spending and taxes, governments maneuver themselves into a cul-de-sac. To be sure, Greece's plight is usually described as a European crisis -- especially for the euro, the common money used by 16 countries -- and this is true. But only to a point.

The USA has a genuine eff-tard as its President and a Congress run by two senile perverted perps. A Botox perp and a Dirty Dingy old man Perp. Perverted in their fascination for taking money from hard-working people and giving it to layabouts and slackers and people of low moral stature, commonly known as Demo-rats.

The welfare state's death spiral is this: Almost anything governments might do with their budgets threatens to make matters worse by slowing the economy or triggering a recession. By allowing deficits to balloon, they risk a financial crisis as investors one day -- no one knows when -- doubt governments' ability to service their debts and, as with Greece, refuse to lend except at exorbitant rates. Cutting welfare benefits or raising taxes all would, at least temporarily, weaken the economy. Perversely, that would make paying the remaining benefits harder.

If Obamanomics continues and we all expect a free lunch and lodgings and hospital stays, the USA will be a Third World shithole in the mid-21st century just like a bunch of Arab countries who were famously rich once upon a time---Iraq, Egypt, Syria---are now Third World hellholes.

Our weather might be better, but the American Dream is turning into a nightmare because the Demo-rats are turning the economy into a casino.

55% in Colorado favor an Arizona-type Immigration Enforcement Law

Rasmussen polls show consistently that across the country 59% of Americans support the Arizona Law ENFORCING US Immigration Regs.

In Colorado, Rasmussen polls 55% for and 35% against the Arizona Enforcement Provisions. Although a Demo-rat Guv named Ritter says he would veto such a bill, his approval rate is at 40% right now and will probably plummet to Pelosi/Reid levels soon.

As for the loathsome May Day and Cinco de Mayo protestors:

Fifty percent (50%) have an unfavorable opinion of the protestors.

So it's no wonder that Obama recently said that it looks like there "won't be time" to pursue an immigration bill before elections this fall. Hmmm..... Wonder why.

Greece Scuttles Backward from EU to Third World

The WSJ has the OECD chart:



that says why Greece should be ejected from the EU and the Eurozone.

Muslim Terrorist Shahzad In Contact with Awlaki

There ain't no Muslim terrorists out there... What, me stupid?

Awlaki is the mastermind of the Ft. Hood Muslim terrorist psychiatrist's murder of 13 US soldiers [although Evan Thomas of Newsweak believes the Dr. was a 'nut case' acting on his own] and of the crotch bomber who studied with him in Yemen. Today, the DNC Handbook for Treason, the New York Times manages a whole article on Awlaki without mentioning the word "terrorist" and saving the word "Muslim" to the last paragraph of a very incriminating article. But Awlaki remains a MUSLIM TERRORIST no matter what traitor Pinch and his henchboy Keller & hit-girl Abramson allow to be said in the Obambiland Chronicles. And Shahzad had other Muslim terrorist buddies in his network:

Sources told ABC News that Shahzad was childhood friends with one of the alleged masterminds of the Mumbai massacre of 2008, in which more than 170 people died. Shahzad is also said to be linked to a man named Muhammed Rehan, whom Pakistani authorities reportedly have in custody. Sources said Rehan helped Shahzad travel to Peshawar and then to Waziristan and made introductions to the Taliban.

Yes, the Muslim terrorist networks go back to the Pakistani Army where Shahzad's pappy prepped him for life above and beyond the Muslim terrorist networks Shahzad's friends were being initiated [or perhaps hazed?] into. Indeed, Shahzad's immediate motivation, sure to be promoted by terrorist-loving lesbians in Mess-NBC like Contessa, Nora & Rachel Maddow, was a pity-party having to do with his family. Sounds like the Bhuttos all over again:

According to a person briefed on the FBI interrogation, Shahzad has told federal agents that he was angry at the CIA missile strikes carried out in Pakistan and suffered a personal crisis in his life. He has reportedly said he carried out the attempted bombing because he was under duress and that he feared for his family's safety if he didn't fulfill the mission.

Shahzad has admitted to receiving bomb-making training and to loading a car with explosives and driving it into Times Square, say U.S. authorities, and is providing valuable information that is helping officials round up possible accomplices.

Of course, when ABC notes that Shahzad is "providing valuable information that is helping officials round up possible accomplices," ABC is acting as Shahzad's accomplice, not surprising given the endemic treason built into NBC ABC & CBS along with their cable affiliates, and warning his inner posse stateside to get to Dubai lickety-split before the Feds or the NYPD stop.

Andrew McCarthy notes that the NYPD & FBI were too busy leaking the whereabouts of Shahzad in Connecticut to notice that he had lost their amateurish attempts to tail him:

After the attempted Times Square bombing, Shahzad, who had been the subject of a huge manhunt, almost made it out of the country on a Emirates flight to Dubai, with a planned connection onward to Pakistan, according to officials.
Authorities said that despite the manhunt, his passport had not been flagged and he was able to buy a ticket with cash and clear airport security. Customs and Border Protection agents working at the super-secret National Targeting Center discovered that Shahzad, who was by this point was on a no-fly list, had purchased a ticket and was on a flight manifest for a plane headed to Dubai, federal officials told ABC News. The agents contacted their CBP counterparts at JFK who then rushed to the plane and alerted the crew to their high-priority passenger.

The crew paged Shahzad via the plane's intercom to come to the front of the plane. Remarkably, Shahzad calmly complied, got up, retrieved his bag and ambled to the front of the plane. He was detained just outside the plane's doors.
CBP agents took Shahzad to a holding cell where the suspected terrorist informed them he had a car in an airport parking lot with a gun inside. Authorities surrounded the car, called in bomb sniffing dogs and cleared the scene.

While the Custom and Border Protection professionals at the National Targeting Center were saving the Keystone Kop NYPD & FBI from looking even more ridiculous than they did under O'Neill of Looming Tower fame, who made his chops alerting media buddies about classified CIA material and thus indirectly cut himself out of the loop & ended up causing 9/11 & the WTC tragedy, the Feds fucked up again & again with the Entertainment Tonight crew finding Shahzad's passport in the garbage behind his home after the FBI had done their "forensics." This on national TV.

Now we can expect porkpie incompetent lesbo-biyotch Napolitano to tell us they were on Shahzad's case from "Day One" although he was on a no-fly list since 1999---not that TSA or Homeland Security would ever have checked that out. So the morbidly obese Janet from another planet will again do her Janet Reno interpretation with a Jamie Gorelick lesbo-bulldyke strut---this will impress Contessa and Nora O'D & Rachel Sport-of-Nature Maddow enough to get Arizona Fats more face-time on Mess-NBC. "Day One" is JN's code word for "we didn't have a clue...."

How Long Before the Media admit that Awlaki is a Muslim terrorist who makes the silly Feds look like Irish drunks by the Ft. Hood, Detroit Crotch Bomb, and now Times Square caper?

Pelosi Tells Us to be "Very Careful" about Expatriating Terrorists

Worries About Losing SEIU Voter Base

Speaker Pelosi isn't as excited as Upchuck Shumer was about the Lieberman/Brown bill to rip citizenship off an American convicted of domestic terrorism.

Adam Serwer believes this is too harsh also and some of his commenters wonder if it would be constitutional to strip a traitor's citizenship. Let's run it by Contessa Brewer, Norah O'Donnell and other Mess-NBC heartthrobs to see if such a law would be "racist."

Pelosi Takes Another Dose For the Team!

To Say Pelosi is a Competent Speaker is a Stretch!

George Will's best book is Men at Work about pro baseball players and he is a lifelong Chicago Cub fan. So maybe he's smart enough to explain to me why Cubs Manager has put fireballing ace Zambrano, himself of Mexican origin, in the bullpen as a setup reliever working the last couple of innings before the closer Marmel. Maybe because Notre Dame football star tight end S wasn't panning out. George is smart enough to figure out the Cubs and why they've not been World Champs since 1908. But can he figure out the brains [I use the term loosely] of Janet Napolitano and Baracko Obummer?

"Misguided and irresponsible" is how Arizona's new law pertaining to illegal immigration is characterized by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She represents San Francisco, which calls itself a "sanctuary city," an exercise in exhibitionism that means it will be essentially uncooperative regarding enforcement of immigration laws. Yet as many states go to court to challenge the constitutionality of the federal mandate to buy health insurance, scandalized liberals invoke 19th-century specters of "nullification" and "interposition," anarchy and disunion. Strange.

It is passing strange for federal officials, including the president, to accuse Arizona of irresponsibility while the federal government is refusing to fulfill its responsibility to control the nation's borders. Such control is an essential attribute of national sovereignty. America is the only developed nation that has a 2,000-mile border with a developing nation, and the government's refusal to control that border is why there are an estimated 460,000 illegal immigrants in Arizona and why the nation, sensibly insisting on first things first, resists "comprehensive" immigration reform.

Arizona's law makes what is already a federal offense -- being in the country illegally -- a state offense. Some critics seem not to understand Arizona's right to assert concurrent jurisdiction. The Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund attacks Gov. Jan Brewer's character and motives, saying she "caved to the radical fringe." This poses a semantic puzzle: Can the large majority of Arizonans who support the law be a "fringe" of their state?

Popularity makes no law invulnerable to invalidation. Americans accept judicial supervision of their democracy -- judicial review of popular but possibly unconstitutional statutes -- because they know that if the Constitution is truly to constitute the nation, it must trump some majority preferences. The Constitution, the Supreme Court has said, puts certain things "beyond the reach of majorities."

But Arizona's statute is not presumptively unconstitutional merely because it says that police officers are required to try to make "a reasonable attempt" to determine the status of a person "where reasonable suspicion exists" that the person is here illegally. The fact that the meaning of "reasonable" will not be obvious in many contexts does not make the law obviously too vague to stand. The Bill of Rights -- the Fourth Amendment -- proscribes "unreasonable searches and seizures." What "reasonable" means in practice is still being refined by case law -- as is that amendment's stipulation that no warrants shall be issued "but upon probable cause." There has also been careful case-by-case refinement of the familiar and indispensable concept of "reasonable suspicion."

Brewer says, "We must enforce the law evenly, and without regard to skin color, accent or social status." Because the nation thinks as Brewer does, airport passenger screeners wand Norwegian grandmothers. This is an acceptable, even admirable, homage to the virtue of "evenness" as we seek to deter violence by a few, mostly Middle Eastern, young men.

Some critics say Arizona's law is unconstitutional because the 14th Amendment's guarantee of "equal protection of the laws" prevents the government from taking action on the basis of race. Liberals, however, cannot comfortably make this argument because they support racial set-asides in government contracting, racial preferences in college admissions, racial gerrymandering of legislative districts and other aspects of a racial spoils system. Although liberals are appalled by racial profiling, some seem to think vocational profiling (police officers are insensitive incompetents) is merely intellectual efficiency, as is state profiling (Arizonans are xenophobic).

Probably 30 percent of Arizona's residents are Hispanic. Arizona police officers, like officers everywhere, have enough to do without being required to seek arrests by violating settled law with random stops of people who speak Spanish. In the practice of the complex and demanding craft of policing, good officers -- the vast majority -- routinely make nuanced judgments about when there is probable cause for acting on reasonable suspicions of illegality.

Arizona's law might give the nation information about whether judicious enforcement discourages illegality. If so, it is a worthwhile experiment in federalism.

Non-Hispanic Arizonans of all sorts live congenially with all sorts of persons of Hispanic descent. These include some whose ancestors got to Arizona before statehood -- some even before it was a territory. They were in America before most Americans' ancestors arrived. Arizonans should not be judged disdainfully and from a distance by people whose closest contacts with Hispanics are with fine men and women who trim their lawns and put plates in front of them at restaurants, not with illegal immigrants passing through their back yards at 3 a.m.


What George tactfully omits in his short piece is that 60% of Arizona homicides are committed by those 460,000 uninvited and illegal trespassers, that most of the home invasions, carjackings, kidnappings to ATMs with guns at a customers' head, armed robberies to denude the victim of wallet and watch and jewelry, cat burglaries and other violent felonies and not-so-violent felonies committed in AZ are done by that one/tenth of uncontrolled, unmonitored populace from south of the Border.

The hands-off Federal policy up to now has been merely shameful, but Sen. John McCain, a Rino of the first water, tonight mentioned that drug cartels are now establishing their US bases in AZ, aided by the lackadaisical law enforcement and detection run by the Homeland Security Administration, led by laughingly inept Janet Napolitano. There was a sense of a build-up to a much more dangerous environment in Arizona, already suffering from declining tourism and other problems.

As soon as the libtard chattering elites proclaimed a boycott of AZ, they drew back from any real legislation on immigration reform before the election, as the 70% support numbers right now don't look encouraging for the usual waffling half-measures and hypocritical finger-pointing the libtards habitually engage in during run-ups to important immigration legislation. They are already going to get their backsides handed to them in November. They don't want to risk making it near-unanimous, despite their huge organizational edge with unions, many of whom are siphons to suck more illegals in country through the tourism and entertainment and construction industries where they have strong presences.

Nat Journal Poll has 39% for Barry Oba-Mao in '12, 50% for Anyone Running Against Him

Imagine What O's Poll #'s Would be if the MSM did its job!

Newsweak may not be around to boost Oba-Mao in '12, but the respected National Journal poll is nothing to scoff at. Welcome Back, Carter, was the early read on this amateurish sophomore in the School of Political Hard Knocks, but it looks like his Democratic majorities may precede him to the Donkey Glue Factory in '10.

Health Care Dooms Small Businesses to 1099 Tax Reporting on Everything

Democrat Politicians blaming other Democrats for Spending the Public's money

Democrats have few members owning small businesses unless you count massage parlors, bars and other entertainment services that employ fewer than 50 employees. {Use your imagination]

So when an obscure paragraph popped out of the 2409 page monstrosity called ObamaCare demanding that:

beginning in 2012 all companies will have to issue 1099 tax forms not just to contract workers but to any individual or corporation from which they buy more than $600 in goods or services in a tax year. The stealth change radically alters the nature of 1099s and means businesses will have to issue millions of new tax documents each year.

Right now, the IRS Form 1099 is used to document income for individual workers other than wages and salaries. Freelancers receive them each year from their clients, and businesses issue them to the independent contractors they hire.
But under the new rules, if a freelance designer buys a new iMac from the Apple Store, they'll have to send Apple a 1099. A laundromat that buys soap each week from a local distributor will have to send the supplier a 1099 at the end of the year tallying up their purchases. The bill makes two key changes to how 1099s are used. First, it expands their scope by using them to track payments not only for services but also for tangible goods. Plus, it requires that 1099s be issued not just to individuals, but also to corporations.

Taken together, the two seemingly small changes will require millions of additional forms to be sent out.

Of course, ObamaCare and Crap & Trade, are about to pile monstrous impositions on the individual's discretionary income as taxes vault through the roof while in Europe, an object lesson is being taught [although not learned in retarded Greece] concerning the old maxim that there's no free lunch. In Greece, the SEIU equivalent union thugs are going on murderous rampages with their demographic heft in the labor force, since one out of every three Greeks employed works for the government. The prize for discovering the obvious goes to a lobbyist/business rep:

"It's a pretty heavy administrative burden," particularly for small businesses without large in-house accounting staffs, says Bill Rys, tax counsel for the National Federation of Independent Businesses. Eliminating the goods exemption could launch an avalanche of paperwork, he says: "If you cater a lunch for other businesses every Wednesday, say, that's a lot of information to keep track of throughout the year."

Of course, Rys and other tax lawyers will have a land office business, along with the hundreds of thousands of IRS bean counters the BIG GUMMINT gets to hire to chase down these tax-dodging small business Tea Party activists. And it looks like the Dept. of Commerce will hire a half-million slackers to help with the 2010 census, which might make Obambi more palatable in the employment department.

In the meantime, the mysterious paragraph seems to have no author, though maybe David Obey was referring to it and other stealth taxes snuck in the huge bill when he said as he retired yesterday that "it seems the public isn't fond of public investments anymore."

For "public investments" refer to the Nast cartoon above and the Tammany Hall Demo-rat crowd of thieves who fingerpoint elsewhere when asked "who stole the public's money?"

AP Disgraces Self [Again] with Ueber-Leftist Biases

James Taranto thrashes the metaphorical buttocks of Associated Press with verbal bullwhippings, subtlely administered. Here is the AP coverage of a Tea Party March on 3/20/10:

House Democrats heard it all Saturday--words of inspiration from President Barack Obama and raucous chants of protests from demonstrators. And at times it was flat-out ugly, including some racial epithets aimed at black members of Congress.

Of course, the three CBC congresscritters were unable to come up with any audio or YouTube evidence, but who needs evidence if it's kangaroo journalism? When a bunch of marchers trashed downtown Santa Cruz Saturday night, AP had a different slant:

Close to 20 businesses were damaged after what started as a peaceful immigrants' rights march in downtown Santa Cruz [Calif.] turned violent, requiring police to call other agencies for help, authorities said.
Police spokesman Zach Friend said an estimated 250 people started marching through the city around 10:30 p.m. Saturday.
It was a harmonious but "unpermitted and unsanctioned event," he said, until some in the crowd started breaking windows and spraying paint on retail shops that line the downtown corridor.
Friend said he wasn't sure if the damage was caused by people marching in support of immigrants' rights, or if the group was "infiltrated by anarchists."
Anarchy signs were spray-painted on some of the buildings.
"They're a group of people who seem to fancy themselves as revolutionaries, but what they really are are a group of morons," Friend said.

Supersleuth Friend will surely let us know if them pesky anarchists did the dirty work among the peaceful immigrant-rights crow, we can be sure.
a
For a good time, click on the Taranto link and read just how skanky snark lefty journalism infects AP & Reuters & AFP & fill-in-the-blank "wired" services.

Wish Fathers Thought Dept: ABC Calls Crist "Rising Star?"

Maybe in Manhattan, but Florida is likely to shit-can this freak Crist whose endless dodgings and twistings and self-centered narcissistic solipcisms have driven his popularity into the toilet.

My next-door neighbor is a four-term Republican FL State Rep and has known Crist for two decades. So has his wife. They both confess that Crist has totally gone Hollywood, ever since he pledged support for Giuliani in '08, then switched to Romney, then when McCain whispered VP in his ear, endorsed the ex-Maverick. Then he hugged Obama and sang the praises of the pork-loaded "stimulus" program until that blew up in his face. The serial liar then denied having supported Obama's spendthrift ways, but a hundred YouTubes with his inane chattering did him in.

Stephanopoulos is an idiot and Diane Sawyer a complete whore, but Claire Shipman is a whore/cretin all in one package. Jake Tapper is the only person at ABC [or the other two fossil networks, for that matter] with a pair of stones. ABC will never catch NBC if Steph keeps driveling out of the side of his mouth about Crist being a "rising star."

Ten Stupidest re Arizona: Obama, SNL Dork only Rate One, but NYT Spawns Four

Stupid/Ugly Cup Winner Greenhouse

The New York Times is going beneath the waves firing away with all flags flying. Byron York has the Ten Stupidest Things said about the Arizona Immigration Statute, which merely enforces U.S. law, including one by a clown in blackface living in the White House.

1. “The statute requires police officers to stop and question anyone who looks like an illegal immigrant.”

– New York Times editorial

2. “As the Arizona abomination makes clear, there is a desperate need for federal immigration action to stop the country from turning into a nation of vigilantes suspicious of anybody with dark skin.”

– Dana Milbank, Washington Post

3. “I can’t imagine Arizonans now reverting to German Nazi and Russian Communist techniques whereby people are required to turn one another in to the authorities on any suspicion of documentation.”

– Cardinal Roger Mahony

4. “This law creates a suspect class, based in part on ethnicity, considered guilty until they prove themselves innocent. It makes it harder for illegal immigrants to live without scrutiny — but it also makes it harder for some American citizens to live without suspicion and humiliation. Americans are not accustomed to the command ‘Your papers, please,’ however politely delivered. The distinctly American response to such a request would be ‘Go to hell,’ and then ‘See you in court.’”

– Michael Gerson, Washington Post

5. “In case the phrase ‘lawful contact’ makes it appear as if the police are authorized to act only if they observe an undocumented-looking person actually committing a crime, another section strips the statute of even that fig leaf of reassurance. ‘A person is guilty of trespassing,’ the law provides, by being ‘present on any public or private land in this state’ while lacking authorization to be in the United States — a new crime of breathing while undocumented.”

– Linda Greenhouse, New York Times

(Greenhouse’s “trespassing” allegation was based on an early version of the Arizona bill that was not the bill that became law. Her mistake was later removed from the Times site, but you can see original version here.)

6. “Federal law treats illegal immigration as a civil violation; Arizona law criminalizes it by using the legally dubious mechanism of equating the mere presence of undocumented immigrants with trespassing.”

– Washington Post editorial

(This editorial makes the same mistake as Linda Greenhouse’s “trespassing” column above.)

7. “I am saddened today at the prospect of a young Hispanic immigrant in Arizona going to the grocery store and forgetting to bring her passport and immigration documents with her. I cannot be dispassionate about the fact that the very act of her being in the grocery store will soon be a crime in the state she lives in…An immigrant who is charged with the crime of trespassing for simply being in a community without his papers on him is being told he is committing a crime by simply being.”

– Bishop Desmond Tutu, Huffington Post

(Tutu is perhaps relying on the erroneous information in the New York Times and Washington Post above.)

8. “It harkens back to apartheid where all black people in South Africa were required to carry documents in order to move from one part of town to another.”

– Cynthia Tucker, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, on ABC’s “This Week”

9. “You can imagine, if you are a Hispanic American in Arizona…suddenly, if you don’t have your papers and you took your kid out to get ice cream, you’re going to be harassed.”

– President Barack Obama

10. “This week, Arizona signed the toughest illegal immigration law in the country which will allow police to demand identification papers from anyone they suspect is in the country illegally. I know there’s some people in Arizona worried that Obama is acting like Hitler, but could we all agree that there’s nothing more Nazi than saying ‘Show me your papers?’ There’s never been a World War II movie that didn’t include the line ’show me your papers.’ It’s their catchphrase. Every time someone says ’show me your papers,’ Hitler’s family gets a residual check. So heads up, Arizona; that’s fascism. I know, I know, it’s a dry fascism, but it’s still fascism.”

– Seth Myers, “Saturday Night Live”

Anyone who wants to wonder why NYT's Conservative-in-Residence David Brooks makes a greater fool of his already preposterous simpering self, or why former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson is now imprisoned in a WaPost cell pleading for clemency, or why the clown in blackface will probably drive his popularity down further, or even
how Arizona tweaked the law to respond to the ridiculous charges, ill-founded, but in a twisted funhouse mirror interpretation, possible, Byron York has confronted the MSM toads & lizards front and center.

I can't wait to see the clown in blackface call 70% of Arizona citizens, including its Hispanic legal population, un-American for wanting to see US laws enforced and crime go down. In a reply to Fox Butterfield, we need more prisons in AZ to lower the crime rate [see previous post].

Fox Butterfield Clone in Seattle???

Fox Knocking Back a High Hard One

Christopher Parker is the head of the University of Washington Institute for the Study of Ethnicity, Race and Sexuality, which immodestly goes by the acronym Wiser. Why not UWiser, you ask? Ask Parker, who is taken seriously by Newsweak, mag for unthinking brain-dead libtards, in an article titled "Are Tea Partiers Racist?" in its unread online sewage spew. Jon Meacham and Evan Thomas will be first before the firing squads when the accounts are settled for the treason party's wild attempt at a coup d'etat is thwarted. The twisted logic of Parker in arriving at his contorted conclusions that Tea Party activists are "racially resentful" makes a pretzel look like I-95 in comparison. [For the non-cognoscenti, Fox Butterfield rivals Norah O'Donnell in vacuous libtard emptiness on their top floors---Butterfield's contribution to the journalistic Annie Hall hall of fame is "Prison population growing despite reduction in crime." For retarded liberals, let me explain---crimes rates were falling because bad guys were behind bars and the term “Butterfield Effect” became standard to describe the failure of someone to put 2 + 2 together. Butterfield and fellow retard Charlie Rose are great buddies and CR loves to suck up Fox's libtard spew. And Butterfield has a Canadian grandfather, so the retardation isn't all self-administered.]

Read Taranto's gleeful unmasking and de-clothing of Parker & his "Wiser" clueless clowns which, of course, was cited by dodo-Meacham & dodissima O'Donnell as more proofs of that "racism" these Commie cadres keep discerning among Tea Party activists.

George Will Bitch-Slaps Nancy Botox, then Insults Mex-Am Legal & Educ Fund for Lack of Math & English Skills!?!

George Will's best book is Men at Work about pro baseball players and he is a lifelong Chicago Cub fan. So maybe he's smart enough to explain to me why Cubs Manager has put fireballing ace Zambrano, himself of Mexican origin, in the bullpen as a setup reliever working the last couple of innings before the closer Marmel. Maybe because Notre Dame football star tight end S wasn't panning out. George is smart enough to figure out the Cubs and why they've not been World Champs since 1908. But can he figure out the brains [I use the term loosely] of Janet Napolitano and Baracko Obummer?

"Misguided and irresponsible" is how Arizona's new law pertaining to illegal immigration is characterized by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She represents San Francisco, which calls itself a "sanctuary city," an exercise in exhibitionism that means it will be essentially uncooperative regarding enforcement of immigration laws. Yet as many states go to court to challenge the constitutionality of the federal mandate to buy health insurance, scandalized liberals invoke 19th-century specters of "nullification" and "interposition," anarchy and disunion. Strange.

It is passing strange for federal officials, including the president, to accuse Arizona of irresponsibility while the federal government is refusing to fulfill its responsibility to control the nation's borders. Such control is an essential attribute of national sovereignty. America is the only developed nation that has a 2,000-mile border with a developing nation, and the government's refusal to control that border is why there are an estimated 460,000 illegal immigrants in Arizona and why the nation, sensibly insisting on first things first, resists "comprehensive" immigration reform.

Arizona's law makes what is already a federal offense -- being in the country illegally -- a state offense. Some critics seem not to understand Arizona's right to assert concurrent jurisdiction. The Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund attacks Gov. Jan Brewer's character and motives, saying she "caved to the radical fringe." This poses a semantic puzzle: Can the large majority of Arizonans who support the law be a "fringe" of their state?

Popularity makes no law invulnerable to invalidation. Americans accept judicial supervision of their democracy -- judicial review of popular but possibly unconstitutional statutes -- because they know that if the Constitution is truly to constitute the nation, it must trump some majority preferences. The Constitution, the Supreme Court has said, puts certain things "beyond the reach of majorities."

But Arizona's statute is not presumptively unconstitutional merely because it says that police officers are required to try to make "a reasonable attempt" to determine the status of a person "where reasonable suspicion exists" that the person is here illegally. The fact that the meaning of "reasonable" will not be obvious in many contexts does not make the law obviously too vague to stand. The Bill of Rights -- the Fourth Amendment -- proscribes "unreasonable searches and seizures." What "reasonable" means in practice is still being refined by case law -- as is that amendment's stipulation that no warrants shall be issued "but upon probable cause." There has also been careful case-by-case refinement of the familiar and indispensable concept of "reasonable suspicion."

Brewer says, "We must enforce the law evenly, and without regard to skin color, accent or social status." Because the nation thinks as Brewer does, airport passenger screeners wand Norwegian grandmothers. This is an acceptable, even admirable, homage to the virtue of "evenness" as we seek to deter violence by a few, mostly Middle Eastern, young men.

Some critics say Arizona's law is unconstitutional because the 14th Amendment's guarantee of "equal protection of the laws" prevents the government from taking action on the basis of race. Liberals, however, cannot comfortably make this argument because they support racial set-asides in government contracting, racial preferences in college admissions, racial gerrymandering of legislative districts and other aspects of a racial spoils system. Although liberals are appalled by racial profiling, some seem to think vocational profiling (police officers are insensitive incompetents) is merely intellectual efficiency, as is state profiling (Arizonans are xenophobic).

Probably 30 percent of Arizona's residents are Hispanic. Arizona police officers, like officers everywhere, have enough to do without being required to seek arrests by violating settled law with random stops of people who speak Spanish. In the practice of the complex and demanding craft of policing, good officers -- the vast majority -- routinely make nuanced judgments about when there is probable cause for acting on reasonable suspicions of illegality.

Arizona's law might give the nation information about whether judicious enforcement discourages illegality. If so, it is a worthwhile experiment in federalism.

Non-Hispanic Arizonans of all sorts live congenially with all sorts of persons of Hispanic descent. These include some whose ancestors got to Arizona before statehood -- some even before it was a territory. They were in America before most Americans' ancestors arrived. Arizonans should not be judged disdainfully and from a distance by people whose closest contacts with Hispanics are with fine men and women who trim their lawns and put plates in front of them at restaurants, not with illegal immigrants passing through their back yards at 3 a.m.

What George tactfully omits in his short piece is that 60% of Arizona homicides are committed by those 460,000 uninvited and illegal trespassers, that most of the home invasions, carjackings, kidnappings to ATMs with guns at a customers' head, armed robberies to denude the victim of wallet and watch and jewelry, cat burglaries and other violent felonies and not-so-violent felonies committed in AZ are done by that one/tenth of uncontrolled, unmonitored populace from south of the Border.

The hands-off Federal policy up to now has been merely shameful, but Sen. John McCain, a Rino of the first water, tonight mentioned that drug cartels are now establishing their US bases in AZ, aided by the lackadaisical law enforcement and detection run by the Homeland Security Administration, led by laughingly inept Janet Napolitano. There was a sense of a build-up to a much more dangerous environment in Arizona, already suffering from declining tourism and other problems.

As soon as the libtard chattering elites proclaimed a boycott of AZ, they drew back from any real legislation on immigration reform before the election, as the 70% support numbers right now don't look encouraging for the usual waffling half-measures and hypocritical finger-pointing the libtards habitually engage in during run-ups to important immigration legislation. They are already going to get their backsides handed to them in November. They don't want to risk making it near-unanimous, despite their huge organizational edge with unions, many of whom are siphons to suck more illegals in country through the tourism and entertainment and construction industries where they have strong presences.

Wall Street Journal Keeps Gaining Customers while NYT, WaPo, LAT & their pilot fish on the edge of bankruptcy?

NYT Managing Editor Keller Whines That Murdoch at WSJ is "Corrosive" as NYT loses 8.47% of PAID CIRCULATION! BooHoo Wa Wa Wa!!!

NYT Whiner-in-Chief Calls Rupert Murdoch "CORROSIVE" evidently because cry-baby Keller and his girly-Krupskaya Abramson of the Jill variety have had their paid circulation rudely rubbed off at the tune of MINUS 8.47% by Rupert's rampantly pubescent Wall Street Journal, the ONLY NEWSPAPER TO GAIN PAID CIRCULATION AND ONLINE PAID PRODUCT IN THE USA LAST YEAR!

The illiterate Butch-spawn led by Joan Walsh over at SALON have the most wonderful headline yet, displaying ignorance and apathy in giant portions with "Rise of free web news and higher prescription and newsstand costs have resulted in declining sales" indicating to Salon that higher expense of scripts from docs leading inevitably to less availability of drugs has seriously cut back on "subscription" to dead-tree delivered-at-the-door ink-stained paper. Salon has a serious medicinal marijuana problem, as an epidemic of glaucoma has evidently brightened their vision while leaving out those pesky details!

UPDATEViacom Prez. Sumner Redstone does cwybaby Keller one better and informs the Michael Milken Conference attendees of his plan

“He lives in ink, and I live in movies and television,” Redstone said. “Ink is going to go away, and movies and television will be here forever, like me.” Redstone, 86, for the second straight year told an audience at the event that he plans “to live forever,” and that he continues to “eat and drink every antioxidant known to man.” His family holding company, National Amusements Inc., was forced to sell CBS and Viacom stock in October 2008 to satisfy lenders.

Redstone might be chewing on sour grapes, and his plan for eternal life hasn't been successfully tried since Jesus resurrected himself on Easter Sunday 1980-odd years ago, And Jesus's whereabouts are in dispute ever since, although he promised to return.

1. The Wall Street Journal 2,092,523 +0.5%
2. USA Today 1,826,622 -13.58%
3. The New York Times 951,063 -8.47%
4. Los Angeles Times 616,606 -14.74%
5. Washington Post 578,482 -13.06%
6. Daily News (New York) 535,059 -11.25%
7. New York Post 525,004 -5.94%
8. San Jose Mercury News* 516,701 N/A
(1/1/10 To 3/31/2010)
9. Chicago Tribune 452,145 -9.79%
10. Houston Chronicle 366,578 -13.77%
11. The Philadelphia Inquirer** 356,189 N/A
12. The Arizona Republic 351,207 -9.88%
13. Newsday 334,809 -9.07%
14. The Denver Post*** 333,675 N/A
15. Star Tribune, Minneapolis 295,438 -7.71%
16. St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times 278,888 -1.49%
17. Chicago Sun-Times 268,803 -13.88%
18. The Plain Dealer, Cleveland 267,888 -8.14%
19. The Oregonian 263,600 -1.83%
20. The Seattle Times*** 263.468 N/A
21. The Dallas Morning News 260,659 -21.47%
22. Detroit Free Press 252,017 -13.31%
23. San Diego Union-Tribune 249,630 -4.45%
24. San Francisco Chronicle 241,330 -22.68%
25. The Star-Ledger, Newark, N.J. 236,017 -17.79%

Most are good only for fishwrap, but The NY Post was started in 1801 by Hamilton, I believe, and is keeping its nose close to the waterline & the SD Union-Trib is the only conservative paper on the Left Coast & has some reader loyalty. I was interviewed by The Oregonian long ago & it seems to be holding firm, perhaps the only lib paper besides the St. Pete Times to do so.

Some of them deserve death for a corporate journalistic culture of braindeath, such as the San Fran Chron, who had a map once when I was there showing Qaddafi's "Line of Death" without it's being in quotes, as though it were a feature on a map that was semi-permanent!

I'm noting the absence of the Baltimore Sun and the Atlanta Constitution---I sort of like the Sun, home of Mencken and some other real journalistic one-of-a-kinds, but the Atlanta Constitution won't be missed by many.

I am hoping Pudge Sulzberger falls off his Harly and grown-ups take over the running of what used to be a good newspaper.

Obama is Republicans' Best Recruiting Tool!!

C'mon, Y'all, Come!

Gallup has "Country DIVIDED Over Obama Re-election in '12." 46% are for Obama's re-election & 50% AGAINST.

Can you imagine the headline if it were 50% for a re-election & 46% against? Lemme guess.

"Overwhelming MAJORITY want Obama re-elected again!!"

And Gallup is an "unbiased" poll!

ObamaCare Liar Asks For Mulligan

Monstrosity Misconceived Mess nicknamed ObamaCare will need constant care and legislative nurturing to get to first base, or the first green, as the mulligan metaphor implies. The Demo-rats are the party of lies, cheating and stealing---now they do union negotiations directly in back rooms in the White House rather than through traditional channels. And now that they find that insurance companies have to raise rates to comply with the ridiculous pre-existing condition clause of the abortion of an ObamaCare bill, they rush back to Congress to amend it.

Here is fantasyland as the dusky duo, Deval & Obama, hallucinate out loud according to the WSJ:

Some 27 states currently have some form of rate review in the individual and small-business markets, but they generally don't leverage it in a political way because insolvent insurers are expensive for states and bankruptcies limit consumer choices. One exception is Massachusetts: Governor Deval Patrick is now using this regulatory power to create de facto price controls and assail the state's insurers as cover for the explosive costs resulting from the ObamaCare prototype the Bay State passed in 2006.

National Democrats now want the power to do the same across the country, because they know how unrealistic their cost-control claims really are. Democrats are petrified they'll get the blame they deserve when insurance costs inevitably spike. So the purpose of this latest Senate bill is to have a pre-emptive political response on hand.

ObamaCare includes several new cost-driving mandates that take effect immediately, including expanding family coverage for children as old as 26 and banning consumer co-payments for preventive care. Democrats are bragging about these "benefits," but they aren't free and their cost will be built into premiums. And those are merely teasers for the many Washington-created dysfunctions that will soon distort insurance markets.

In Massachusetts, Mr. Patrick says his price-control sally will be followed by reviewing what doctors and hospitals charge—or in other words for price controls on the medical services that make up most health spending. ObamaCare will gradually move in the same direction.

Or maybe not so gradually, judging by the study released last last week by Richard Foster, the Obama Administration's Medicare actuary. Mr. Foster predicts net national health spending will increase by about 1% annually above the status quo that is already estimated to be $4.7 trillion in 2019. This is one more rebuke to the White House fantasy that a new entitlement will lower health costs.

"Although several provisions would help to reduce health care cost growth, their impact would be more than offset through 2019 by the higher health expenditures resulting from the coverage expansions," Mr. Foster writes—and that's assuming everything goes according to plan. He considers it "plausible and even probable" that prices in the private market will rise as greater demand due to subsidized coverage runs into the relatively fixed supply of doctors and hospitals.

Most of ObamaCare's unrealistic "savings" come from cranking down the way Medicare calculates its price controls, and Mr. Foster writes that they'll grow "more slowly than, and in a way that was unrelated to, the providers' costs of furnishing services to beneficiaries." He expects that 15% of hospital budgets may be driven into deficits, thus "possibly jeopardizing access to care for beneficiaries." Isn't reform grand?

This is a recipe for an unprecedented fiscal disaster on a scale that makes the Great Depression that FDR prolonged for a decade until World War II pulled the US economy out of a slump. This rivals the Hindenburgh for pure spectacular insanity:

The official who will preside over this fiscal trainwreck is Donald Berwick, the Harvard professor and chief of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement who the White House has nominated to run Medicare. Dr. Berwick explained in an interview last year that the British National Health Service has "developed very good and very disciplined, scientifically grounded, policy-connected models for the evaluation of medical treatments from which we ought to learn." He added that "The decision is not whether or not we will ration care—the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open. And right now, we are doing it blindly."

In fact, the real choice with medical care, as with any good or service, is between rationing via politics and bureaucratic lines or via a competitive market and prices. As Democrats are showing by trying to pass a new insurance bill, they want all U.S. health care to function like price-controlled Medicare. Dr. Berwick's job as the country's largest purchaser of health care will be to find ways to offset the higher insurance and medical costs that ObamaCare's subsidies and mandates will cause, which will inevitably mean political rationing of care.

In a 17-minute, 2,600-word answer to a question about tax increases in Charlotte, North Carolina earlier this month, Mr. Obama mentioned that "what we've done is we've embedded in how Medicare reimburses, how Medicaid reimburses, all these ideas to actually reduce the costs of care." The embedding via price controls is already underway.

Welcome to Brave New World, or rather 1984, Demo-rat style.

Wen Raises Eyebrows by Praising Hu Yaobang in inscrutable PRC

Wen Jiabao

The Economist has a very intriguing story about Premier Wen Jiabao in its latest issue, that raises more questions than can be answered for perhaps several years to come:

ON APRIL 15th the arcane and neglected art of reading China’s political tea leaves suddenly surged back into fashion. The Communist Party’s turgid broadsheet, the People’s Daily, published an article on the top of its second page by the prime minister, Wen Jiabao. Its glowing praise for Hu Yaobang, a politically incorrect former party chief whose death triggered the Tiananmen Square protests 21 years ago, struck a remarkably liberal note.

Hu’s death on April 15th 1989 prompted thousands of students to take to the streets in mourning. They bore aloft pictures of the late leader, who though still a member of the ruling Politburo when he died had been forced to resign as the party’s general secretary two years earlier for being too soft on dissent. Because Hu had not been fully purged, the party had no choice but to hold an elaborate funeral for him. This provided cover for the students, who soon switched their attention to demands for democratic reform.

Since the bloody suppression of the protests, Hu has been referred to sparingly by Chinese officials; and the liberalism with which he was associated has also been permitted only sparingly. Of late, it has been notably absent, as the party cracks down on human-rights activists, tightens controls on the internet and frets about unrest in Tibet and Xinjiang. Yet China’s leaders are preparing for a change of guard in 2012-13. Mr Wen will be stepping down. Could it be that, having established China as a global economic power, he and his colleagues are at last thinking of making it politically more respectable?

The speculation triggered by such an potentially historical article is positively dizzying in its ramifications. Is the Peoples' Armed Forces ready for a more liberal political arena now that the economic base of the PRC, recently named by the IMF as the world's third economic power behind the USA and Japan, appears as solid as ever? This question is not brought up by the Economist editors, who are aware that too much frank discussion of the various implications of Wen's article could arouse enmity among the more conservative---i.e., Stalinist-Maoist---elements remaining in the PRC power structure. Which in turn might invite retaliation by said atavistic elements to the detriment of the Economist's access to journalistic and other sources in the Middle Kingdom?
In any event, Wen's article does leave a very intriguing anecdote at the very end, the final para of the piece:

Bao Tong, who was a top aide to the late Zhao Ziyang, Mr Hu Yaobang’s equally liberal successor, believes there could be an ultra-subtle message in the party’s re-embrace of Hu. Officials—he points out—like to encourage the idea that Zhao helped topple Hu (though Mr Bao says he did not). Far from being a sign of yearning for reform, support for Hu could indicate repudiation of Zhao, about whom reminiscences remain strongly discouraged. Zhao was thoroughly purged after Tiananmen and died under house arrest five years ago.

Mr Wen’s article, however, does hint strongly at a huge problem in China’s political system. It describes how Hu instructed Mr Wen to sneak out of an official guesthouse and visit a village under cover of darkness, to find out what peasants were really thinking. “Remember, do not inform the local government,” Hu was quoted as saying. A quarter of a century later, Chinese leaders remain almost as prone to deception by their underlings.

Perhaps the entire gist of the piece by Wen is contained in the rather pathetic anecdote, which almost pleads for a more open dialogue among various players in the vast political arena in the economically and socially expanding PRC. Perhaps the Premier is hinting that political change commensurate with the giant social and economic growth should be a topic for consideration in the near future?

Why Police Like Covering Tea Party Rallies and Hate Anti-War D-Bags

James Taranto skewers the hapless witless illiterate "journalists" at the now paper-only and soon to be s-canned CSM:

The Christian Science Monitor has a report airing another "antiwar" grievance. Title: "Are 'Tea Party' Rallies Given Preferential Treatment by Police?" The story notes that local law-enforcement agencies have sometimes applied less stringent permitting and public-safety rules to tea parties than they did to "antiwar" protests.

In the parlance of constitutional law, such regulations are known as "reasonable time, place and manner restrictions." They are permitted under the First Amendment, but they must be "viewpoint neutral," which is to say that the government may not treat one protest more leniently out of sympathy with its message.

But as NewsBusters.org notes, the Monitor buries its lead in the fourth, "to be sure" paragraph. It turns out that the disparities in rules are not driven by sympathy for the tea parties, but by differences in the behavior of the protesters:

To be sure, permitting rules and police preparedness are often developed based on past behavior at various kinds of protests. Many go back to the 1960s and 1970s when violent rallies erupted over the Vietnam War. Such protests sprung up again during the presidency of George W. Bush, when protesters clashed with police in New York City and elsewhere during large-scale demonstrations against the Middle East wars. With tea party rallies so far proving more orderly, police have given them more latitude.

Of course no one but a skilled practitioner of paralepsis would suggest that the "antiwar" movement was composed of potential Timothy McVeighs. Yet everyone from left-wing bloggers to a certain former president has advanced that claim about the tea-party movement.

D-Bag and Serial Cocksuckee ClyntOOn, the Billy Jeff of yore, demonstrated that he is in danger of losing his anointed position as Chief Purveyor of BS and CalPers and other RICO-union crime schemes and falling into describing what is now a presumed majority of Independents and Republicans---remember when this silly a-hole used to croon that the "innate wisdom of the American people" had shown itself whenever his popularity was above 50% [in his two national elections, he never won a MAJORITY, but only a PLURALITY of votes and would have been an asterisk if the MSM had not vaulted Ross Perot back into the campaign after he had demonstrated his complete insanity concerning N. Koreans disrupting his daughter's wedding]. Billy Jeff now must face the following aimed at his empty-headed nonsense:
T

he Democrats' nasty attitude toward skeptical voters may help explain the latest Gallup finding: The gap in partisan identification among Americans is now a single point--46% Democratic, 45% Republican--after the Democrats enjoyed a huge advantage for several years starting in 2005. There's a six-point shift from a year ago, when the figures were 51% D, 39% R. But the number of "Republican identifiers" has held constant at 28%; the swing has been entirely in the direction of "Republican-leaning independents."

Has the tea-party movement's importance been exaggerated, as Martin and Smith claim at such length that it has? Only if independent voters don't really decide American elections.

The sooner that BJ ClyntOOn and his obnoxious spouse leave the political scene the better, and ditto for Botox Queen Nancy and the Dingy Harry Reid who both will get a rapid exit along with the Demo=rats to history's memory hole.

On Wisconsin: on its Way to becoming Florida on Steroids?

Wisconsin is my native state, which I left upon full adolescence to go to college in another state. I worked in politics in Milwaukee and environs in 1968 in the Gene McCarthy campaign, bussing around 2000 students from Ann Arbor where I was in grad school at the time. My only family connections were my paternal grandfather, a judge, and my maternal great, great uncle, an alderman at the end of the nineteenth century.

My minor in getting an M.A. was Poli Sci and Wisconsin's progressive history is well-known, as the state which originated the primary and direct voting for Senators, among other innovations on the U.S. political scene. But in the sixties, two Democrat Senators Gaylord Nelson and William Proxmire, allowed the state to be hijacked to the left even further, with all sorts of state reps mimicking their Senate and House reps and allowing the most generous welfare allotments for those out of work in the country. The predictable result was a demographic deluge of poor blacks and Hispanics, many accompanied by their criminal family outliers. The result was that the Milwaukee I left in the mid '60s was virtually unrecognizable in the '90s when I fetched up with family on the north side of Chicago and visited my siblings and parents on a frequent basis. Whole neighborhoods had in the twenty-five year interim been semi-gutted, Detroit-style, and I recalled my two summers as a taxi driver in the '60s while going to grad school as a virtual Garden of Eden when black neighborhoods had yet to be swamped with crime, drugs, gangs, and drive-by violence.

John Fund in today's WSJ describes how a complete grifter like Sen. Feingold is pushing to get Wisconsin's voter registration laws completely under the control of national political parties---in this case, a criminal entity named the Wisconsin Democrat Party is trying to suborn the state's independence and throw it into a Chuck Shumer NY-sponsored national law on registering and absentee ballots, which have become RICO-type organizations like ACORN's chief means of electoral fraud and crime. As Fund puts it in his excellent piece on Wisconsin's descent into fraud, chicanery, and political trickery:

Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold, a Democrat, has introduced federal legislation to mandate same-day registration in every state, claiming the system has worked well in his state. Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York is readying a bill to override the election laws of all 50 states and require universal voter registration—which would automatically register anyone on key government lists. This is a move guaranteed to create duplicate registrations, register some illegal aliens, and sow confusion.

Fund goes on to remind us citizens to beware of crime-oriented Senators like the insufferable oaf Shumer and the tricky lil Jew-boy Feingold:

Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold, a Democrat, has introduced federal legislation to mandate same-day registration in every state, claiming the system has worked well in his state. Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York is readying a bill to override the election laws of all 50 states and require universal voter registration—which would automatically register anyone on key government lists. This is a move guaranteed to create duplicate registrations, register some illegal aliens, and sow confusion....The court made the obvious point that "disenfranchisement" is a two-way street. Fraud, it noted in Gonzales v. Arizona (2006), "drives honest citizens out of the democratic process. . . . [V]oters who fear their legitimate votes will be outweighed by fraudulent ones will feel disenfranchised."

Sad that a once thriving political culture under LaFollette and others has now become a disgraceful demonstration of Three Monte at the polls on election day.