Going Down Roman Road of Decline Fast
Judge Andrew Napolitano - 6/27/11
Saturday, December 31, 2011
License to License - Government Adds A New Layer
Chicago now requires a license for anyone who wants to help people obtain licenses!
Is a license to license Licenses next? "What comes first? Second Base."
Second City swindle
Want to help someone get a license to cut hair or open a business in Chicago? First you’ll need a license. Since 2009 the City of Big Shoulders has required a license for anyone who wants to help people obtain licenses by working as an “expediter” within the city’s vast and famously corrupt bureaucracy.
“An expediter is a person who, for compensation, seeks to obtain licenses, permits and certificates for another person,” Chicago’s Department of Business Affairs & Consumer Protection explains. “Expediters work on the behalf of developers, contractors, businesses and homeowners in obtaining permits, licenses and certificates. An expediter also monitors the progress of applications through any stage of the application review process or inquires as to the status of an application within any City department. An expediter may also pick up a license or permit application or certificate from any City department.”
Nationwide, Reason Foundation analyst Adam Summers estimated in 2008, occupational licensing imposes costs of $35 billion to $42 billion per year (in 2000 dollars). He also found that licensing requirements reduce competition, thus reducing the annual rate of job growth by an average of 20 percent.
Although the expediter’s license requirement raises questions about freedom of trade and the First Amendment right to petition government for a redress of grievances, it has so far escaped legal challenge in Chicago, where the unemployment rate as of July was 9.9 percent.
Friday, December 30, 2011
The Government needs this lesson: "Poverty is to be stayed away from even for the purposes of Study"
Here is a replay of true wisdom. The Butler in "Sullivan's Travels" speaks about poverty.
Bureaucracy: Hopeless From the Start
“For the main thesis of Professor von Mises is that bureaucracy is merely a symptom of the real disease with which we have to deal. That disease is excessive State domination and control.”
Bureaucracy: Hopeless From the Start | Foundation for Economic EducationThursday, December 29, 2011
No Matter What the Bill of Rights Says, Obama's Anti-Gun Agenda Shows No Sign Of Stopping
You can't make it up as you go along. The Bill of Rights is bigger than you, or your ideas or your radical hero's or your father's dreams.
Go Away! The sooner, the better for us all!
Published December 28, 2011
President Obama keeps pushing for gun control. "I just want you to know that we are working on [gun control]. We have to go through a few processes, but under the radar,” President Obama told Sarah Brady, the former president of the Brady Campaign, this past spring.
His push as been quiet but relentless.
Just this past week Obama signaled that he was going to just ignore two new parts of the 2012 Omnibus Spending bill. Although he signed the spending bill into law, he simultaneously issued a so-called "signing statement," a note that presidents have started attaching to legislation stating how they interpret the law they are signing or whether they believe part of it is unconstitutional.
Obama’s statement claimed that Congress couldn’t put restrictions on how he wanted to spend to fund lobbying for gun control and the National Institute of Health studies of gun control.
But why should the federal government use taxpayer dollars to pay for lobbying?
Obama has had numerous false starts on gun control. Just in November, his administration moved to ban target practice on public lands, but the opposition was so swift and strong they immediately backtracked.
A couple of weeks ago the Obama administration suffered another embarrassment. It was discovered that the Obama administration oversaw the sale of guns to Mexican drug gangs in its Fast & Furious program to bolster statistics of guns crossing over to the border to these very drug gangs.
This scandal is quite incredible as the Obama administration ordered gun dealers to make sales to Mexican drug gangs against their wishes to help the administration’s push for more gun control. And this follows the revelation in July that the Obama administration had pushed federal agents involved in the Fast & Furious scandal to support gun control regulations during their congressional testimony.
read on at:
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2011/12/28/president-obamas-anti-gun-agenda-shows-no-sign-stopping/print#ixzz1hy2oD0U8A= NO! Just the opposite. Q = Are people with concealed handgun carry permits a menace to society?
The Volokh Conspiracy » Are people with concealed handgun carry permits a menace to society?
• December 28, 2011 short post in full
According to the New York Times, the answer seems to be “yes.” An article in yesterday’s Times by Michael Luo collects some anecdotes about misbehavior by a few licensees in North Carolina. The Times article has some numbers in it, and it provides the number of North Carolinians with carry permits (240,000). After a thorough search of North Carolina records, the Times finds that about 1% of permitees were convicted of something, other than a traffic offense, over the past five years. Of these 2,400 convictions, by far the largest group is “nearly 900 permit holders were convicted of drunken driving, a potentially volatile circumstance given the link between drinking and violence.”
“Drunk driving” (which, I would guess, the Times uses as a shorthand for lesser offenses such as driving while impaired) is a serious crime in itself. But just because a woman has three glasses of wine with dinner at a restaurant, and then gets caught in a police checkpoint, doesn’t make her some “potentially volatile” person who is going to murder somebody in an inebriated rage.
In any large population (e.g., 240,000) there will be at least a small percentage who over a period of time are found guilty of some crimes. This does not mean that that population as a whole is dangerous. It would have been useful to compare the conviction rates of North Carolinians who have carry licenses with the convictions rates of those who do not. I suspect that the non-licensee crime rate would be much higher, especially for violent gun crimes.
In a 2009 article in the Connecticut Law Review, I collected data from Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio, Louisiana, Texas, and Florida. (The state data begin on page 564 of the article.) The data show that concealed carry licensees are much more law-abiding than the general population, and that the rate of gun misuse of any sort (let alone having something to do with violence in public place) is less than one in one thousand.
Instapundit collects some other responses to the Times’ effort to foment hysteria and prejudice against the persons who exercise the constitutional right to carry firearms for lawful protection.
[This post was corrected in response to reader comments, including the fact that I wrongly wrote that the Times had not reported the total number of licensees.]
"Socialist Premier" and man of the people Dines Out for $260
Middle Class Warriors Dine Out for $260 | The Blog on Obama: White House Dossier
by on DECEMBER 29, 2011,
President Obama and Michelle had dinner last night at Honolulu’s famed foodie paradise, Alan Wong’s.
The middle class was not invited.
I realize the Obamas are wealthy people, and that wealthy people have the right to drop $260 of their disposable income on chow. But if you’re going to inviteAssociated Press photographers along to capture your trip to Target and stage photo ops at PetSmart and Best Buy, then I’m going to write about your unpublicized excursion to Alan Wong’s.
The press pool was not invited in to take photos this time. In fact, others were discouraged from doing so too. From the pool report:
Diners have been trying to takes pictures of POTUS, only to be chased off by advance staffers.
Since when are people not allowed to take pictures?
According to the pool report, the Obamas and their friends dined on the five-course “tasting menu” that was tasty to the tune of $75 a person, $105 with wine. Among the highlights were “Sassey Salad” and bacon wrapped pork loin.
-more at link-
If only US Intelligence were that capable - Chavez: U.S. May Be Behind Leaders’ Cancer
If cancer could be made to attack specific individuals, then is it possible a cure for cancer might be engineered?
Unfortunately various forms of cancer is common in people once they enter middle age. Some forms are deadly, most forms can be treated today.
By Daniel Cancel - Dec 28, 2011
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez hinted that the U.S. may be behind a “very strange” bout of cancer affecting several leaders aligned with him in South America.
Chavez, speaking a day after Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, said the Central Intelligence Agency was behind chemical experiments in Guatemala in the 1940s and that it’s possible that in years to come a plot will be uncovered that shows the U.S. spread cancer as a political weapon against its critics.
“It’s very difficult to explain, even with the law of probabilities, what has been happening to some of us in Latin America,” Chavez said in a nationally televised speech to the military. “Would it be so strange that they’ve invented technology to spread cancer and we won’t know about it for 50 years?”
Chavez, who was diagnosed with an undisclosed form of cancer in June and had a baseball-sized tumor removed in Cuba, has called for a regional summit of leaders who have battled cancer including Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, her predecessor Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva and Paraguay’s Fernando Lugo.
-more at link-
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
A Monstrous Moment at the UN General Assembly
What more reason is needed to say goodbye to the UN forever?
By Claudia Rosett On December 22, 2011
Short full post
This isn’t just a low moment. It is despicable. The United Nations General Assembly has just paid tribute to the late North Korean tyrant, Kim Jong Il, with delegates standing to observe a minute of silence in his memory.
The Associated Press reports [1] that this kind of tribute is “customary for leaders who die in office” and that North Korea’s Mission to the UN requested this tribute to Kim. There were no speeches, and the chamber was half empty.
None of that excuses the depraved act of the UN honoring a man whose rule was responsible for abominations and atrocities inflicted by Kim Jong Il and his regime during Kim’s 17 years in power, or for that matter Kim’s long prior career under his father of engineering terrorist acts such as bombings and abductions abroad. For the UN to pay any tribute to Kim Jong Il is to insult the million or more Koreans who died of famine, the hundreds of thousands consigned to Kim’s prison camps, and the many millions more leading lives of grotesque fear and deprivation — all as the cost of Kim’s rule.
Nothing in the UN rulebook requires the General Assembly to pay tribute to its array of resident monsters. The Assembly could have replied to the North Korean mission that there will be no tribute to anyone, dead or living, who contributed to North Korea’s totalitarian horrors. But this same General Assembly that annually demands billions of dollars from U.S. tax payers — and gets them from our federal government — has just paid tribute to Kim Jong Il. What more do we need to know?
Worst Spin Possible = in the 1930s the glacier was falling apart as quickly as it has been recently.
Lying by false emphasis, it is all a hoax!
Web edition : Monday, December 19th, 2011
Greenland's Helheim Glacier is shedding ice at a high rate (same as 1930s).
Big chunks of ice have been falling off Greenland’s Helheim Glacier at an unusually high rate over the past 10 years, a new study finds.
Warm summers and the intrusion of warmer Atlantic waters may be to blame, researchers in Denmark and the United States report online December 12 in Nature Geoscience.
To reconstruct the glacier’s history since 1890, the scientists examined sediments from the fjord below. Sand grains in the sediments revealed that only in the 1930s was the glacier falling apart as quickly as it has been recently.
Michelle Obama has a better vacation wardrobe than you do - but not necessarily better looking
She does not have style or taste.
12-27-11
Merry Christmas everyone! I hope you’re having a lovely vacation. Because I’m not actually on vacation. Unless you consider drinking coconut coffee from the Keurig while I work in my office a vacation. Because I don’t. At any rate, I saved the US taxpayers nearly $4 million by not being First Lady and flying off for a 17-day vacation in Hawaii on the taxpayers dime. You can thank me later.
Michelle Obama, noted supporter of the 99% and champion of the poor, on the other hand, is reportedly draining taxpayer funds to finance a massive year-end festival of relaxation on the sunny shores of Oahu while the rest of us slave away so that we aren’t unemployed come her husband’s fourth year as President.
And don’t think she’s dressing like a regular tourist while she’s there, either, you peons. As she accompanied Barack and family to church services on the Kaneohe Bay Marine Base on Sunday, Michelle sported a Resort Collection Sophie Theallet sundress (thumbnail), which, at the time it was purchased in late 2009, cost between $1K and $2K. Similar dresses from the Resort 2012 collection sell for that much and more.
Lt. Col. Karl Trenker shot during heist plugged holes with fingers and told kids he'd be fine
Lt Colonel Trenker added: ‘I go to Iraq and Afghanistan multiple times, and I haven't been shot or blown up, and I'm here at home in Florida.
- Karl Trenker confronted two men; was shot three times
- Used battlefield training to stem blood from his wounds
- He was never hurt while serving in Afghanistan and Iraq
By PAUL THOMPSON and MARK DUELL
Last updated at 8:02 PM on 27th December 2011
A U.S. Marine officer has told the incredible story of how he survived a street robbery by plugging bullet holes in his body with his fingers.
Lieutenant Colonel Karl Trenker, 29, of Miramar, Florida, was shot three times as he confronted two men who had stolen a gold chain from him.
He said he used his battlefield training from Afghanistan and Iraq to stem blood from chest wounds by shoving his finger into the gaping wound. ...
As he showed off the necklace one of the men shoved him and grabbed the jewellery.
Lt Colonel Trenker said he chased after the two men when one of them turned round and opened fire, hitting him multiple times.
He said he plugged the bullet holes while calling his girlfriend on his cell phone and calmly telling her: ‘I've been shot.’
‘He's talking to me just as calmly as I'm sitting here talking.
‘He told me: “I've been shot three times, my fingers are in the bullet holes, the police are going to take care of the kids".'
Officers responding to the shooting found 20-year-olds James Flournoy and Jeff Steele close to the scene.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2079107/Marine-Karl-Trenker-shot-Craigslist-sale-turned-heist-plugged-holes-fingers-told-kids-hed-fine.html#ixzz1hqug8MEv
Newt gets bum rap on gun rights
The President and Senate keeps trying to shoot our eyes out.
By Bob Barr
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2011/12/26/newt-gets-bum-rap-on-gun-rights/#ixzz1hqqrAd92
One of my favorite Christmas movies is “A Christmas Story,” the 1983 classic that centers on young Ralphie’s machinations to have Santa Claus bring him a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas. Ralphie’s mother, of course, fears he would “shoot his eye out” if this occurred.
Watching the movie recently brought to mind the manner in which GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich is being blasted by some of his Republican opponents and by certain firearms organizations for being insufficiently supportive of the Second Amendment. As a strong supporter of that provision in our Bill of Rights and a long-time board member of the National Rifle Association, I am always sensitive to claims that candidates aren’t supportive of the Second Amendment.
In this instance, the claims that Gingrich doesn’t support the Second Amendment are, at best, mistaken and, at worst, intentionally deceptive. In either event, the claims and the simplistic manner in which they are being bandied about do an injustice to both Gingrich and the Second Amendment.
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2011/12/26/newt-gets-bum-rap-on-gun-rights/#ixzz1hqqrAd92
Not Crony Capitalism, it's Crony-Graft-Corruption-Fraud! MF Global chief missing $1.2B is financial adviser to EPA
Why are we putting up with these Bureaucratic Thieves from this administration who regulate based on fraud just to steal?
By Jim McElhatton -
The Washington Times 12-27-11
During two days of recent congressional hearings into how as much as $1.2 billion disappeared from MF Global customer accounts, the chief operating officer of the imploding investment firm responded again and again that he did not know.
Yet as the House and Senate interrogated Bradley I. Abelow and other top executives at MF Global Holdings Ltd., lawmakers did not mention Mr. Abelow's role as a financial adviser for the Environmental Protection Agency, which as of Tuesday listed him as the chairman of its financial advisory board.
Even as he finds himself the public face of a bankruptcy and admitted to lawmakers that he had no idea how client funds disappeared, Congress and the administration have voiced no public concern about Mr. Abelow's role advising the $8.6 billion government agency on its finances.
"EPA relying on Wall Street for financial guidance is like the blind leading the blind," said Jeff Ruch, president of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group based in Washington.
"In Abelow, you have a Wall Street executive who just presided over the disappearance of $1 billion in investor funds purporting to help guide federal infrastructure financing."
The EPA did not respond to multiple messages concerning Mr. Abelow's status with the board, though the EPA's website still reports that he is its chairman and notes his job at MF Global.
-read more at link-
It's Getting to be a Habit - Another Green Industry Failure - A Bad Habit
"Meanwhile, (former) Governor Granholm continues to parade around the country on a book tour touting green energy as the future and the federal Department of Energy continues to pour money down the drain."
Posted on December 27, 2011 By Henry Payne
When the MSM isn’t outright ignoring Green scandals like Climategate, it is shrugging off the failure of Big Government’s green “investments” like Solyndra as isolated incidents.
“The failure of a single company — and anyone who knows anything about transformative technologies knows there will be failures — is no reason to stop our efforts to catch up,” huffs the New York Times’s editors.
“Those who oppose taxpayer-funded subsidies for alternative energy, either on ideological grounds or to protect their own stake in the carbon-based status quo, have pounced on (the Solyndra bankruptcy and Chevy Volt troubles) as proof that all such government initiatives are prone to failure,” writes theDetroit Free Press editorial page.
But the proof is everywhere.
Before Barack Obama hung out his White House Investment Bank shingle (“We invest, taxpayers bear all the risk”), former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm had already thrown away millions in taxpayer money on green ventures from bankrupt Fisher Coachworks to Evergreen to RASCO. Obama & Co. have followed with investments in boondoggles like Beacon Power and A123 Systems — which is struggling in part because government has mistakenly invested in too many battery suppliers chasing too little demand.
Now the snowball of bad investments has claimed another victim: Saginaw’s GlobalWatt solar company.
-read on at link-
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Depression Lessons for the one we are in and Krugman doesn't get
So it’s official. The New York Times, or at least columnist Paul Krugman, has declared us to be in a worldwide depression. And just in time for Christmas.
By Amity Shlaes from 12-14-11
Democracy is at stake, Krugman alleged in his Dec. 11 column, and Europe, economically and socially, will tip into fascism if it doesn’t cease pursuing “ever-harsher austerity, with no offsetting effort to foster growth.”
Those are big assumptions and scary forecasts. But Krugman is comfortable making them, he says, because he has evidence. His evidence that European democracy is teetering in favor of repression is the case of Hungary, which is a member of the European Union but still has its own currency, the forint. There, the governing Fidesz party is pursuing policies that suppress free expression, judicial independence and the news media.
As for the theory of austerity slowing growth, Krugman evokes the Great Depression. Doing so has an authority all by itself, because the Great Depression is mysterious and its hold on the public imagination is strong.
The columnist frequently references the standard three-stage narrative of what happened. In the late 1920s or early 1930s, President Herbert Hoover committed a fatal error and imposed austerity in the form of tax increases and budget cuts. The U.S. economy failed. President Franklin Roosevelt came in and spent, and we commenced recovery. After 1936, Roosevelt hesitated and tightened the government’s belt -- austerity again. We plunged back into depression. The economy didn’t return to its 1929 rate of growth until the spending run-up to World War II.
-read on at link-
The Long Rough Awakening of Russia
I reached Douglass North, and gave him a rundown on what I was witnessing in Russia. Then I asked him how long it would take before Russia might become a normal, free and, democratic society — in which both the utilities and the political institutions really worked. I was hoping against hope for an answer with a time horizon within the decade or so.
North replied: “Oh, about 50 years.”
Let us hope it won't take that long here after Obama.
By Claudia Rosett On December 24, 2011
Twenty years ago this Christmas day, Mikhail Gorbachev gave a speech announcing “I hereby discontinue my activities at the post of President of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” And with that, the totalitarian and murderous construct of the USSR, already uncoupled earlier that month by Russian President Boris Yeltsin and the presidents of Ukraine and Belarus, was no more.
These were monumental events. Yet so tumultuous is the world right now that the 20th anniversary of the Soviet collapse is figuring as little more than a footnote in the news. In Russia itself, the events of the hour are the protests against the reign of Vladimir Putin, with tens of thousands of people bravely demonstrating in the freezing streets, alleging foul play in the recent parliamentary elections and, as the AFP reports [1], carrying banners with slogans such as “We woke up and this is only the beginning.”
If so, it has been a long beginning. Twenty years have passed since Russia officially embarked on its awakening. An entire new generation has come of age, and the years since Christmas of 1991 have been filled with trouble, disappointments, crude grabs for Russia’s colossal natural resources, the fading of freedoms once promised, and the rise of a new autocracy. There would be room for a more joyous celebration of the Soviet collapse, were there less call to deplore a great deal of what has followed.
But I would not give up on Russia, or at least on the Russians.
-read on at link-
Bernhard Goetz victim commits suicide on anniversary of subway shooting. How did Eric Holder miss releasing him early?
"Ramseur’s sentence, 180 days in jail plus a $1,500 fine, was tacked on to the 8 to 25 years he was already serving for the 1985 rape of a pregnant Bronx woman on a deserted rooftop."
Here is a “good” in goodbye.
On the anniversary of the day 27 years ago that he and three teens pals were wounded at close range by New York “subway vigilante” Bernhard Goetz, shooting victim James Ramseur is dead by his own hand. He was 45 years old.
Ramseur’s end came in a seedy Bronx hotel, where his body was discovered before noon on Thursday. He died of an apparent drug overdose. Authorities found an empty prescription medicine vial in the bathroom with its label scratched off.
Ramseur’s life had been on a downward trajectory ever since he and three cohorts—Darrell Cabey, Barry Allen, and Troy Canty, all 19—approached Goetz aboard a southbound No. 2 train on December 22, 1984. Claiming he felt threatened, Goetz opened fire, hitting all four. Ramseur took a slug in the arm, which required surgery.
During Goetz’s trial, Ramseur’s courtroom decorum was so abominable that the judge, Acting Justice Stephen G. Crane, sentenced him to the maximum time allowable on contempt charges.The judge said that Ramseur’s behavior had conveyed ”viciousness and selfishness more eloquently than words could,” adding, “your conduct has played right into the hands of Mr. Goetz’s lawyer. He owes you a vote of thanks.”
Ramseur’s sentence, 180 days in jail plus a $1,500 fine, was tacked on to the 8 to 25 years he was already serving for the 1985 rape of a pregnant Bronx woman on a deserted rooftop. He ended up serving the maximum time. His release came only 17 months ago.
At the time of the shootings three decades ago, New York was in the throes of an unprecedented wave of street crime. Some city residents saw Goetz as a hero. Others, homing in on the race of the four victims, saw him a gun-crazy racist who converted a subway car into his personal shooting gallery.
As to the fate of the other principals in the case:
-read on at link, it is amazing-
Untainted by the ravages of celebrity
Wasn't Caroline "You Know" Kennedy available?
12-20-11
Chelsea Clinton debuted on NBC, and the world was, to say the least, underwhelmed. Trifecta looks at the broadcast career of Chelsea Clinton and wonders why she, or any other Clintonista, is delivering the news to America.
Constitution? Written by Dead White Men - Obama says he won't be bound by gun control ban in omnibus
He really has a Dictator's View of the Presidency. Obama has no clue as to what "constitutional responsibility' is.
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