Shut it Down and Throw the Bums Out - Showdown Over the UN Staff Payola

The Rosett Report » Showdown Over the UN Staff Payola

Posted By Claudia Rosett On August 29, 2011

While American taxpayers keep tightening their belts, it’s been profligacy as usual for the United Nations, where 4,800 upper-level staff in New York recently received cost-of-living increases that effectively raise their already tax-exempt salaries by almost 3%. This de facto pay hike was the work of theInternational Civil Service Commission ^[1], described on its web site as “an independent expert body ” made up of 15 members appointed by the UN General Assembly “in their personal capacity” to serve four year terms regulating and coordinating the “conditions of service” of UN staff. A big concern of the General Assembly in maintaining this body is that there be “broad geographical representation” — currently including members from countries such as Russia, China, Algeria, Ghana, Jamaica and Bangladesh, as well as from the U.S., Germany and France.

In other words, here’s yet another case in which the U.S. contributes 22% of the money, while the other 192 member states of the UN General Assembly have the overwhelming say in how it gets spent — or, in this instance, in appointing the 15 people who decide how much will be spent on salaries and perks ^[2] for staff in New York. Thus are we now seeing this de facto pay rise , in addition to the tax-exemptions, dependency allowances, school grants, travel allowances and in some cases rental subsidies.

But kudos to the U.S. State Department! (Yes, you read that right). From the U.S. Mission to the UN, there has come an objection to this latest UN move to spend other people’s money padding the pay of its own staff. ...

-read on at above link-

There is a tale of a Lake of Mercury Under a Pyramid in China. Let us see if Al Gore can float upon it.

"Fluorescent lighting makes me feel like I’m dead, and am just haunting whatever room I happen to be in. It makes me feel like the top of my head has been replaced with something clammy and toxic."

Who Among Us Does Not Love an Al Gore Joke? | Blogs | NCRegister.com

SIMCHA FISHER Thursday, July 07, 2011

Twenty years ago, new consumer technology was usually easy to understand., like: Oh, it’s a phone without wires, so you can talk and walk around. Oh, it’s a Datasette for your VIC-20, so you can store Q*bert for later enjoyment while playing Radar Rat Race. Oh, it’s a crimper, so your hair will look crimpy.

Simple, right? Maybe they weren’t all great products, but they were pretty much self-explanatory. Even if you didn’t want one yourself, you could at least imagine someone who might. ...

It gets worse. More and more, technology is not only nearly useless, but it actively betrays us—creates more problems than it solves. For instance, mobile phones kept getting smaller and smaller, because it was considered obvious that smaller is cooler and cooler is better. Which led to construction workers everywhere using their phones mainly as something to curse at as they try and try and try and try to hit the right little bitty button with their giant, meaty pointer fingers.

And then we have, of course, the miserable, wretched CFL bulb.

Read more: http://www.ncregister.com/blog/who-a#ixzz1Wu23jpln

Opinion Journal: Missing: Jobs -- Steve Moore and Mary O'Grady on this month's lousy jobs report - WSJ.com

Private over public. That is always better.

Video - Opinion Journal: Missing: Jobs -- Steve Moore and Mary O'Grady on this month's lousy jobs report - WSJ.com

Here is the grim follow-up:

CBO's Fiscal Fantasy 8/24/2011 6:22:59 PM

Editorial writer Steve Moore on the Congressional Budget Office's latest budget report. OpinionJournal.com Assistant Editor Allysia Finley on how Republican candidates match up against President Obama in swing states; and Susan Dudley, director of the George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center, gives the facts about President Obama's purported regulatory rollback.

Barbarians at our electronic gates

Ominous! Power centered dictators may all say "go ahead, be evil."

http://online.wsj.com/video-center/opinion.html

Time to Shoot Back! US Authorities Investigate Incursion By Mexican Federal Police

US Authorities Investigate Incursion By Mexican Federal Police - News Story - KVIA El Paso

September 2, 2011 By Web Producer Fernie Ortiz

EL PASO, Texas -- Border Patrol officials are investigating an incursion by Mexican federal police into the United State on Thursday morning.

U.S. Border Patrol spokesman Doug Mosier said armed officers with Mexico's Secretaria de Seguridad Publica federal police were in the incursion, which took place in El Paso, near the Border Patrol's Ysleta station.

An ABC-7 viewer contacted the station early Thursday, saying her son, husband and friends were hunting on the Rio Grande levy on the U.S. side when men on the Mexico side fired shots, narrowly missing them. She said more men on the Mexico side drove up with automatic weapons and into to U.S. side. She said the armed men fired weapons and stole hunters' chairs and drove back into Mexico.

Mosier said Border Patrol agents and Texas Parks and Wildlife officers were sent to the area immediately.

"Upon approach, our agents observed those subjects (Mexican officers) who committed the incursion return back to Mexico," Mosier said.

Mosier said that at no point of the initial investigation were there any allegations of shots being fired at subjects on the U.S. side of the border, nor is there any information to suggest that any personal items were stolen from the U.S. side of the international boundary.

"We remain in constant and direct contact with our partners in the government of Mexico as the investigation unfolds."

-read on and see video at above link-

False piety just for show and confrontation - A Not-So-Amusing Day at the Amusement Park

Hijab with sexy swim suit... some piety.

A Not-So-Amusing Day at the Amusement Park | FrontPage Magazine

By Rich Trzupek On September 2, 2011

A confrontation between Muslims celebrating the end of Ramadan at the Rye Playland amusement park in Westchester County, New York and local authorities turned ugly yesterday, in a perfect demonstration of the toxic influence agitation outfits like the Council on American-Islamic Relations have had on American discourse. “It’s clear, this all happened because we’re Muslim,” said Dena Meawad, an 18-year-old Muslim woman who was in the midst of the action. She, of course, is the aggrieved victim of the supposedly racist, sexist and, above-all, Islamophobic American society.

Three years ago, Westchester County, which operates Rye Playland, put a policy into effect that forbids people from wearing headgear on certain rides. That rule was imposed because of safety concerns, both that a hat landing on the tracks of certain rides could cause problems and that some coverings – like a head scarf – could represent a strangulation hazard. Peter Tartaglia, deputy commissioner of Westchester County Parks, said the Muslim American Society of New York was informed about the headgear rule on multiple occasions in advance of yesterday’s event, during which about 3,000 members of the society visited the park. “Part of our rules and regulations, which we painstakingly told them over and over again, is that certain rides you cannot wear any sort of headgear,” Tartaglia said.

Some of the young women attending the event either didn’t get the message or chose to ignore it. According to reports, some Muslim women began arguing with police over the rules when they were denied entrance to rides. The confrontation escalated to the point that about 100 police converged on the park to get the melee under control. Fifteen Muslims, including three women, were taken into custody. Two park rangers were injured in the fracas.

The Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was naturally quick to take offense over the incident.

Shocking, 'Gambling at Rick's,' Eva Peron ‘kept Nazi treasure taken from Jews’ in Argentina

Even ex-Nazis hiding in Argentina and Bolivia, Vatican complicity, big shock.

So what else is new?

Eva Peron ‘kept Nazi treasure taken from Jews’

9-2-11

Eva Peron, the former Argentine first lady, is believed to have kept Nazi treasures taken from wealthy Jewish families killed in concentration camps, according to a new book.

‘The Politically Incorrect Guide to Latin America’ aims to highlight a series of little known controversies about leading leftist figures in the history of the continent.

It claims that Simon Bolivar, the hero of Latin America’s independence wars, was scared that blacks and indigenous Indians would seize power and that Salvador Allende, the Marxist Chilean president of the 1970s, considered a Nazi-inspired policy of sterilisation.

Its authors, the Brazilian journalists Leandro Narloch and Duda Teixeira, said the book is intended to generate discussion about issues airbrushed from history books.

United Against Free Speech: Muslims, Homo’s & Commies Make Strange Bedfellows…

United Against Free Speech: Muslims, Homo’s & Commies Make Strange Bedfellows… — Winds Of Jihad By SheikYerMami

It's inbred and dysfunctional! 'federal family' for government expands under Obama

Now we are Comrades and the Mexicans are Citizens!

FEMA'S use of term 'federal family' for government expands under Obama

Sept. 1, 2011 GEORGE BENNETT

Don’t think of it as the federal government but as your “federal family.”

In a Category 4 torrent of official communications during the approach and aftermath of Hurricane Irene, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has repeatedly used the phrase “federal family” when describing the Obama administration’s response to the storm.

The Obama administration didn’t invent the phrase but has taken it to new heights.

“Under the direction of President Obama and Secretary Janet Napolitano, the entire federal family is leaning forward to support our state, tribal and territorial partners along the East Coast,” a FEMA news release declared Friday as Irene churned toward landfall.

The G-word — “government” — has been nearly banished, with FEMA instead referring to federal, state and local “partners” as well as “offices” and “personnel.”

'Obama is destroying the country. Some say this destructiveness is intended; most say it is inadvertent, an outgrowth of inexperience'

Since the '60s we have enfeebled our public education system even as our wealth has expanded. Moral and cultural relativism now obscure individual responsibility. We are uninspired in the wars we fight, calculating our withdrawal even before we begin—and then we fight with a self-conscious, almost bureaucratic minimalism that makes the wars interminable.

Shelby Steele: Obama and the Burden of Exceptionalism - WSJ.com

Sept 1, 2011

If I've heard it once, I've heard it a hundred times: President Obama is destroying the country. Some say this destructiveness is intended; most say it is inadvertent, an outgrowth of inexperience, ideological wrong-headedness and an oddly undefined character. Indeed, on the matter of Mr. Obama's character, today's left now sounds like the right of three years ago. They have begun to see through the man and are surprised at how little is there.

Yet there is something more than inexperience or lack of character that defines this presidency: Mr. Obama came of age in a bubble of post-'60s liberalism that conditioned him to be an adversary of American exceptionalism. ...

Mr. Obama did not explicitly run on an anti-exceptionalism platform. Yet once he was elected it became clear that his idea of how and where to apply presidential power was shaped precisely by this brand of liberalism. There was his devotion to big government, his passion for redistribution, and his scolding and scapegoating of Wall Street—as if his mandate was somehow to overcome, or at least subdue, American capitalism itself.

...

Anti-exceptionalism has clearly shaped his "leading from behind" profile abroad—an offer of self-effacement to offset the presumed American evil of swaggering cowboyism. Once in office his "hope and change" campaign slogan came to look like the "hope" of overcoming American exceptionalism and "change" away from it...

-read on at above link-