Jonah Goldberg on The Tyranny of Cliches, Creating NRO, and the Firing of John Derbyshire

John Derbyshire laid out facts that made too many people uncomfortable.

Jonah Goldberg on The Tyranny of Cliches, Creating NRO, and the Firing of John Derbyshire - Hit & Run : Reason.com
Jim Epstein & Nick Gillespie | May 31, 2012

"Liberals are sure they're in the reality-based community and anyone who disagrees with them either has a bad brain, or in some other way rejects empiricism and science, and they are the only ones working with the building blocks of facts and reason," says National Review's Jonah Goldberg, author of the new book, The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas.

"And I call bullshit on that."

Goldberg, who became the editor of National Review Online in 1999, is responsible for creating the tone and format of the highly trafficked website, which built on the magazine's venerable reputation while signaling, as he puts it, "that this is not your father's National Review." Goldberg's new book, which follows his best-selling 2008 Liberal Fascism, argues that liberals should stop claiming their ideas derive solely from science and fact but never ideology--a way of arguing that stifles honest debate. Liberal arguments sometimes take the form of hackneyed cliches meant to sound self-evident but that in reality disguise a political bent, such as "violence never solves anything" or "I may disagree with you but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."

Goldberg sat down with ReasonTV's Nick Gillespie for a wide-ranging discussion about liberal and conservative discourse, his early vision for National Review Online, and the firing of long-timeNational Review contributor John Derbyshire for writing a racist article in Taki's Magazine. Goldberg also explains why he plans to vote for Mitt Romney despite his lack of enthusiasm for the presumptive GOP nominee.

Approximately 30 minutes.

Go to Reason.tv for downloadable versions and subscribe to ReasonTV's YouTube Channel to receive automatic updates when new material goes live.

We live in a time of fluid Euphemisms, So Gay today and Gone Tomorrow?

How's that queer thing working out, or is now in again?

NY Court Rules Calling Someone Gay Isn't Slander - NYTimes.com
5-31-12

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — A court says it's no longer slander in New York to falsely call someone gay.

A mid-level appeals court on Thursday wiped out decades of rulings, including its own, to say that society no longer treats false comments that someone is gay, lesbian or bisexual as defamation. Without defamation, there is no longer slander, the court ruled.

"These appellate division decisions are inconsistent with current public policy and should no longer be followed," stated the unanimous decision written by Justice Thomas Mercure of the Appellate Division's Third Department based in Albany. While the decision sets new case law in New York now, it could still go to a definitive ruling by the state's highest court, the Court of Appeals.

The New York decision finds that the comment is now "based on a false premise that it is shameful and disgraceful to be described as lesbian, gay or bisexual."

The ruling stems from an incident in the Binghamton area. Mark Yonaty sued, claiming a woman spread a rumor she heard in hopes that Yonaty's girlfriend would break up with him. He said the comment hurt and ultimately destroyed the relationship. Yonaty and his attorney didn't respond to a request for comment. The decision, as in many defamation suits, provides few details.

-few more at link-

Nanny state regulators are into baseball, and now on football?

Is there no human, animal or mineral activity on earth these busybodies don't want to regulate?
The answer is NO!
If they can tax it, even the better, in their view.
But if they can't extract funds immediately, they will get their pound of flesh through shameless publicity.


Personally, I now find most spectator sports to be terribly boring and unwatchable. Ad a desk-load of dumb-ass sportscasters and "color" fools to tell you what you already know, and the dismal spectacle is entirely unwatchable. Especially the capture the flag variety, e.g. socker, basketball, football, and hockey. 
Now all these sports need is 535 more "color" commentators in congress.

Illegal contact: Nanny state regulators to blow the whistle on football? - Washington Times

By Patrick Hruby  May 30, 2012

Is football the newest front in America’s culture wars?

Rush Limbaugh seems to think so.

Three times in the past six months, the conservative radio host eschewed his usual targets to warn listeners that the sport is under attack, besieged by liberals and threatened with extinction.

“It’s not going to be long before the wusses, the New Castrati in our society are going to suggest that football be banned, that tackle footballbe banned,” Mr. Limbaugh said during a broadcast in December.

Hyperbole aside, Mr. Limbaugh may have a point. Long a refuge from national political polarization — Tom Brady’s quarterback rating is just as awesome in the red states; our fantasy squads are equally as hopeless in the blue states — football recently has been engulfed in a high-profile public debate about its safety and viability, an argument that echoes previous cultural clashes over everything from cigarettes to semi-automatic weapons.

“I think what we have with football right now is a very old debate in our society,” said Dave Zirin, who writes about the politics of sports for the Nation and authored “A People’s History of Sports in the United States.” “In some ways it’s an argument between individual choice and state intervention.

“In one camp, you have conservatives who are almost like libertarians in terms of certain freedoms. Then you have the kind of nanny-state approach of saying the state needs to step in and remove people’s toys because they are so inherently harmful. We saw the same lines around Prohibition and issues like motorcycle helmets.”

-more at link-

Tacky

Never responsible, always a victim. No wonder he can't lead.

Blamer in Chief? | The Weekly Standard

Daniel Halper

May 31, 2012 2:26 PM

At the unveiling of former President George W. Bush's official portrait at the White House this afternoon, President Barack Obama joined his predecessor and their wives in delivering brief (and at times nice, cordial, and funny) remarks. But there was a seemingly out of place moment during the ceremony when Obama seemed to veer into reiterating his frequent trope that he inherited a bad economy from Bush.

-more at link-

The Camel's Nose - ‘Managing the Internet certainly not one of the UN’s roles’

Get Out of the UN NOW! The Camel is inside the tent.

US diplomat: ‘Managing the Internet certainly not one of the UN’s roles’ | The Daily Caller
Josh Peterson 5-30-12

American policymakers met Wednesday at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. to discuss how international proposals to regulate the Internet would affect the U.S. and developing nations. That fate which may decided at a conference in Dubai in December.

Policymakers were adamant that the proposals to renegotiate a treaty that deregulated international telecommunications in 1988 through the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a little-known U.N. agency responsible for the regulation of long-distance phone calls and satellite orbits, would be harmful to the developing nations.

Treaties are only binding on countries that agree to them, and American experts were emphatic that not only would the U.S. oppose the proposals to shift the Internet governance away from its current multi-stakeholder process, but also that it would work with allies in Latin America to oppose these proposals.

“At the outset, let me make one point perfectly clear: The administration, and of course the Department of State, firmly supports the position that the United Nations is not the place for the day-to-day technical operations of the Internet,” said Richard Beaird, Senior Deputy United States Coordinator for International Communications and Information Policy in the State Department.

“We have made this point repeatedly, and we will continue to make it,” said Beaird. “The United Nations and the ITU can do many things, and they can do those things effectively and importantly. In the areas of development, in the areas of training as a forum of discussion for international policy matters, and [in] the case of the ITU of course, preemintently, in the area of spectrum allocation and management on an international basis. But managing the Internet is certainly not one of the U.N.’s roles.”

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/05/30/us-diplomat-managing-the-internet-certainly-not-one-of-the-uns-roles/#ixzz1wSvcuTdR

UN corruption, Say it ain’t so, Baracko “U.N. Me”

Film takes on horrors of UN corruption, Michael Moore-style | The Daily Caller
Caroline May 05/30/2012

News reports of corruption, negligence and poor judgment at the United Nations have left many shaking their heads at the international body in recent decades.

A new film by Ami Horowitz and Matthew Groff, set to premiere in select theaters on June 1, aims to trace the U.N.’s decline from an institution created in 1945 — “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small … and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom, and for these ends to practice tolerance and live together in peace” — to one that would honor Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe as a “Global Leader for Tourism.”

Horowitz, a self-described right-of-center foreign policy hawk, explained that the film, “U.N. Me,” is meant as a visual op-ed directed in a fashion suited to capture Americans’ elusive attention spans.

“I knew this stuff going in, I just didn’t realize how deep the rabbit hole went,” Horowitz told The Daily Caller in an interview, noting that while he is more conservative, the rest of the film’s production crew are left-of-center.

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/05/30/film-takes-on-horrors-of-un-corruption-michael-moore-style/#ixzz1wStarIJY

As a Leader in the Effort to Form a More Socialist America, Obama Celebrates Socialist Dolores Huerta

These Organizers all seem to 

have the same message.

“I think organized labor is a necessary part of democracy,” according to Huerta. “Organized labor is the only way to have fair distribution of wealth.”
Doesn't this sound familiar? Sounds like Obama's campaign speeches!




Here are humongous egos that promote a false humanitarian image of gross altruism that just lays waste to the masses they purport to support.

Obama Celebrates Socialist Dolores Huerta | FrontPage Magazine

By Matthew Vadum On May 31, 2012 @ 12:55 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 12 Comments

When you’re a champion of so-called social justice, there is no end to the accolades you’re likely to receive regardless of your faults.
Falsely described by those on the Left as a compassionate humanitarian, radical labor leader Dolores Huerta has received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama. Huerta “has fought to give more people a seat at the table,” Obama said euphemistically.
The award is not all that surprising for an administration that kisses the ring of Al Sharpton.
In an acceptance statement Huerta pushed all the right politically correct buttons:

The great social justice changes in our country have happened when people came together, organized, and took direct action. It is this right that sustains and nurtures our democracy today. The civil rights movement, the labor movement, the women’s movement, and the equality movement for our LGBT brothers and sisters are all manifestations of these rights.

Did Huerta leave any aggrieved interest group out? If she did, it must have been an innocent oversight because she’s far too wonderful and inspiring a leader to have deliberately slighted any gripe-laden, tax-eating constituency.
Huerta’s 501c3 community organizer-training nonprofit, the Dolores Huerta Foundation, receives funding from high-profile left-of-center philanthropies such as the (Bill and Hillary) Clinton Family Foundation ($100,000 in 2010), Women’s Foundation of California ($35,000 since 2009), and the (Norman) Lear Family Foundation ($10,000 since 2010).
Huerta will soon be portrayed by Rosario Dawson, a beautiful and glamorous movie star, in an upcoming film. And who knows what other tributes Hollywood will generate for the octogenarian socialist.
But despite all the hype, the oft-imprisoned Huerta is no angel. She is less the civil rights leader imagined by the mainstream media and more a champion of vulgar redistributionism. As the saying goes, if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, but if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. Community organizers like Huerta don’t teach anyone how to fish: they teach activists how to steal their neighbors’ fish. This is what Huerta and her ilk call social justice.
-more at link-

Control Freak Bloomberg Plans a Ban on Large Sugared Drinks

The big question is, why doesn't anyone tell Bloomberg to Buzz-Off?
Maybe there should also be height requirement on who becomes Mayor. It would be about as good a use of time and effort as the rest of this mental midget's other mirco-managing dictates.

Bloomberg Plans a Ban on Large Sugared Drinks - NYTimes.com

This is what an all seeing, all knowing, Government, that protects all and taxes all, does: Bunny Business

Bunny Business - By David Pryce-Jones - David Calling - National Review Online
full short post

By David Pryce-Jones

May 27, 2012 10:38 A.M.

The crisis of the European Union is gathering pace, several countries within it face insoluble economic distress, the euro is unlikely to survive this year, a number of banks are technically bankrupt – and what’s been exercising the great men with their hands on destiny? The chocolate bunny made by the famous Swiss firm of Lindt, that’s what.

The great men have been examining this chocolate bunny, and they don’t like the way it is wrapped in gold foil and has a red ribbon round its neck. This is “not sufficiently different,” so they say, from the wrappings of other chocolate products. Apparently Lindt has failed to establish the bunny’s “inherent distinctive character.” And the European Court of Justice accordingly issues a fatwa.

Imagine it. Grown men, highly paid bureaucrats, have laboured through years of committee meetings, travelling from 27 countries to attend, amassing files with pleas and recommendations for and against, when it’s all about concealed protectionism for chocolate bunnies that aren’t as popular as Swiss. Hitherto their masterstroke had been the specification of the permissible curvature of the banana. Ordinary people can respond only with a belly laugh – and this may be the only joyful thing to remember when the death throes of this whole preposterous experiment are over at last.

OK, Who put the script to "Gentleman's Agreement" on the Teleprompter? Barack Obama—Some of, no, all of my friends were Jews (in Chicago), Scholar of Judaism

Get one wrong one in here,
and it'll come out of us.
                   
It's no fun being the fall guy
for the kikey ones.

from the script to "Gentleman's Agreement"

Barack Obama—Friend of Jews, Scholar of Judaism | The Weekly Standard
full short post

William Kristol

May 30, 2012 1:28 PM

From Haaretz:

Earlier Tuesday afternoon, Obama and White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew met about 20 Conservative Jewish community leaders. ...

"I not going to tell you again how I even feel about Israel, but why [are] we still talking about it," Obama said, reminding his guests that all his friends in Chicago were Jewish - and at the beginning of his political career he was accused of  being a puppet of the Israel lobby. ...

Obama also stressed he probably knows about Judaism more than any other president, because he read about it - and wondered how come no one asks Speaker of the House of Representatives John Boehner or Senate minority leader Mitch McConnel [sic] about their support to Israel." 

Amazing.

Three comments:

1. The reason no one asks John Boehner or Mitch McConnell about their support for Israel is ... because they really do support Israel. The reason people ask Barack Obama about his support for Israel is because his support for Israel has been equivocal.

2. It's truly pathetic that Obama has to reach for the tired (to say the least) trope that some of his best friends were Jewish. Actually, one wishes more of his best friends were pro-Israel Christians. They might have had more luck convincing him, a fellow Christian, that he should be pro-Israel.

3. And the claim that Obama knows more about Judaism than any president? His vanity boggles the mind. One could begin by citing Adams and Madison, who knew Hebrew, or Harry Truman, who knew Jewish history ... but it's silly to dignify this claim with a rebuttal. In thinking about the presidents since Truman, though, I'd guess the president who knew the most about Judaism was Jimmy Carter, who taught Sunday school and had a deep interest in religion. So let's stipulate that of the modern presidents, Carter and Obama "know" the most about Judaism. But what is it they know? In Obama's case, one could ask whether what he “knows” is what he learned from Rashid Khalidi and Jeremiah Wright.

Barack Obama has insulted 38 million Poles with his crass and ignorant 'Polish death camp' remark

"ignorance and incompetence" about sums up Obama and his administration.

Barack Obama has insulted 38 million Poles with his crass and ignorant 'Polish death camp' remark – Telegraph Blogs
NILE GARDINER May 30, 2012

Obama has a long track record of insulting the Poles. In 2010 he chose to play golf on the day of the funeral of the Polish President Lech Kaczynski, the Polish First Lady, and 94 senior officials who perished in the Smolensk air disaster. Eight months earlier he humiliated Warsaw by pulling out of the agreement over Third Site missile defence installations in Poland and the Czech Republic. And last night Barack Obama caused huge offence in Poland by referring to a Nazi death camp in Poland as “a Polish death camp” while awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom to a Polish resistance fighter. As ABC’s Jake Tapper reported:

Poles and Polish-Americans expressed outrage today at President Obama’s reference earlier to “a Polish death camp” — as opposed to a Nazi death camp in German-occupied Poland.

“The White House will apologize for this outrageous error,” Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski tweeted. Sikorski said that Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk “will make a statement in the morning. It’s a pity that this important ceremony was upstaged by ignorance and incompetence.”

The president had been trying to honor a famous Pole, awarding a Presidential Medal of Freedom to Jan Karski, a resistance fighter who sneaked behind enemy lines to bear witness to the atrocities being committed against Jews. President Obama referred to him being smuggled “into the Warsaw ghetto and a Polish death camp to see for himself.”

The Obama administration has tried to downplay the incident.

-more at link-

Her Uncle and Father Would Too! Raul Castro’s Daughter Endorses Obama

What more needs to be said about the rotten core of Obama and where he has tried to take America.
The endorsement is honest and that the Democrat's 'leaders' are now just Communist by another name.

Raul Castro’s Daughter Endorses Obama | FrontPage Magazine

By Humberto Fontova On May 30, 2012 

“If I were a U.S. citizen I’d vote for Obama for president,” boasted Mariela Castro during her San Francisco conference last week. “I think he is sincere, I think he speaks from the heart.” To cheers and applause from the San Franciscan crowd Raul Castro’s daughter also proclaimed that “what we want is the power of emancipation through socialism.”
Last year, former Democratic president Jimmy Carter thoroughly charmed Mariela’s father and uncle in Havana. “We greeted each other as old friends,” gushed Carter regarding his meeting with Fidel Castro.
“In 2002, we received him warmly,” reciprocated Castro. “Now, I reiterated to him our respect and esteem.”
“Jimmy Carter was the best of all U.S. Presidents,” gushed Raul Castro while seeing his American guest off personally and jovially.
In fact, for many prominent Democrats, Castro’s Cuba resembles the very Land of Oz, with Cubans laughing the days away. If this sounds hyperbolic, here’s “Conscience of the Democratic Party” George McGovern after a visit to Cuba in 1975: “Everywhere we were surrounded by laughing children who obviously loved Fidel.”
-more at link-

Who dreams up this nonsense? Commerce considers labeling Arab Americans a disadvantaged minority

There are swarms of bureaucrats at all levels who spend their entire fat paid and benefited, mean, little minded existence, coming up with this useless and expensive dribble. 
It is how the eunuchs always keep their rice bowls full. m/r

Commerce considers labeling Arab Americans a disadvantaged minority - The Hill's On The Money

By Rachel Leven - 05/29/12

The Commerce Department is considering naming Arab Americans a socially and economically disadvantaged minority group that is eligible for special business assistance.

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) petitioned Commerce earlier this year to ask that Arab Americans be made eligible for the Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA), which helps minority entrepreneurs gain access to capital, contracts and trade opportunities.

The ADC petition cited “discrimination and prejudice in American society[,] resulting in conditions under which Arab-American individuals have been unable to compete in a business world.” The group claimed discrimination against Arab Americans increased after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

“The ADC petition asserts that, in the government’s efforts to protect Americans, they essentially took away the rights of other Americans,” according to the notice of proposed rulemaking about the petition.
-more at link-

Dead White Man's Law do not apply to this admin. - Holder to brief black pastors on campaign 2012

The enemy on-shore!

Holder to brief black pastors on campaign 2012 | Campaign 2012 | Washington Exami
byJoel Gehrke

May 29, 2012 1:

Attorney General Eric Holder, the IRS, and the liberal lawyers at the ACLU will brief several hundred pastors in the African American community on how to participate in the presidential election -- which the Congressional Black Caucus chair expects will help President Obama's campaign.

"We will have representatives from nine denominations who actually pastor somewhere in the neighborhood of about 10 million people, and we're going to first of all equip them with the information they need to know about what they can say and what they cannot say in the church that would violate their 501c3 status with the IRS," Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., told MSNBC today.

"In fact, we're going to have the IRS administrator there, we're going to have the Attorney General Eric Holder there, we're going to have the lawyers' organization from around the country, the ACLU -- all giving ministers guidance about what they can and cannot do," he noted.

Cleaver said they would not tell pastors which candidate to support. They will let them know who to regard as the bad guys, though (hint: not Democrats). 

-more at link-

From the Public Safety Committee: Heads Must Roll! Booker's comms director resigns after Meet the Press flap

For such a tough City, everyone is afraid of their own shadow, and with good reason.
Wonder who Anne Torres is going to vote for in the Presidential Election?

Booker's comms director resigns after Meet the Press flap | The Daily Caller
05/29/2012 Alexis Levinson
full short post

Newark Mayor Cory Booker’s communications director Anne Torres resigned Tuesday, following conflict over remarks the Mayor made on NBC’s Meet the Press two weekends ago. PolitickerNJ first reported the news.

Booker drew fire last week for criticizing the Obama campaign, for which he is a surrogate, saying he found the attack ads about Romney’s time at Bain Capitol “nauseating.” Booker said he felt the same way about attacks from the other side about President Barack Obama’s former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Booker later apologized for the remarks and reaffirmed his support for the president.

According to PolitickerNJ, “Sources say [Torres’] resignation comes amid internal administration strife in the aftermath of Booker’s appearance on Meet the Press.”

“Effective today, I am resigning from my position as Communications Director,” Torres said in a statement. “It has been a pleasure to serve in this Administration for six years, and as a Newarker, there is no greater reward than to work for the city that you love. I’ve had the opportunity to work with an amazing team, and wish the Mayor the best.”

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2012/05/29/cory-bookers-communications-director-resigns-after-meet-the-press-controversy/#ixzz1wHpE6nPc

REVEALED: Hundreds of words to avoid using online if you don't want the government spying on you

How about: "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you."
Nothing like getting mail from the government, is there?
Isn't it great to hear from the government? It is always so beneficial, saves so much of your time and money!
Yep, nothing like hearing from your helpful government, is there?
And the government is always so responsible with the money it takes from you, like an agency to spend its time monitoring the words you use!

REVEALED: Hundreds of words to avoid using online if you don't want the government spying on you | Mail Online

It is not just them! NASA hit for sloppy hyping of global warming

NASA promoting global warming 

The whole of government, NGOs, Schools, the Press, Utilities and phony crony commie corporations are all sticking their big snouts into this slop trough!

NASA hit for sloppy hyping of global warming | Washington Examiner
May 25, 2012  Paul Bedard
Several former top NASA executives and scientists, including Gemini, Apollo and Space Shuttle managers and astronauts, are accusing the agency of sloppy and imprecise science in promoting global warming alarms and are also charging NASA’s chief scientist with hypocrisy for warning of a climate change catastrophe.

“We are not trying to stifle discourse, but undisciplined commentary, lacking in precision, is wholly inappropriate when NASA’s name and reputation is attached,” said 41 former NASA officials in a letter to agency boss Charles Bolden.

At issue is NASA’s history of talking up the potential disaster from global warming. The same group recently accused the agency of using public statements and the NASA website to side with climate change alarmists. NASA’s chief scientist, Waleed Abdalati, responded that the agency wasn’t promoting global warming, just helping in the research.

But then he recently told a Senate hearing that the coastlines will be flooded, and lives potentially lost because climate change will likely raise sea levels by 0.2 meters to 2 meters, based on “commonly considered” warming scenarios.

Abdalati added: “The consequences of a 1 meter rise in sea level by the end of this century would be very significant in terms of human well-being and economics, and potentially global socio-political stability.”

The NASA critics choked when they heard those comments, accusing the agency in a new letter of making imprecise predictions based on bad science. And Abdalati was accused of hypocrisy.
-more of the scam at the link-

Obama wants to set us adrift in a sea full of sharks, the UN!

Pirates of the UN

The sovereignty of the USA is of no importance to Obama, he wants world governance by the third world. He dwells in the world of central planning, communist relativism, corruption and the end justifies the means.
America means less than just another country to him. It needs to give up its power and treasure to be fair, with equal domination by the rest of the world. m/r

Obama’s Land of the LOST | FrontPage Magazine

By Michelle Malkin On May 28, 2012

What’s green and blue and grabby all over? President Obama’s new pressure campaign for Congress to ratify the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST).
The fight over LOST goes back three decades, when it was first rejected by President Ronald Reagan. He warned that “no national interest of the United States could justify handing sovereign control of two-thirds of the Earth’s surface over to the Third World.” According to top Reagan officials William Clark and Ed Meese, their boss believed the “central, and abiding, defect” was “its effort to promote global government at the expense of sovereign nation states — and most especially the United States.”
The persistent transnationalists who drafted LOST favor creation of a massive United Nations bureaucracy that would draw ocean boundaries, impose environmental regulations and restrict business on the high seas. They’ve tinkered with the document obsessively since the late ’60s, enlisted Presidents Clinton and Bush, and recruited soon-to-depart GOP Sen. Dick Lugar to their crusade. Ignore the mushy save-the-planet rhetoric. Here’s the bottom line: Crucial national security decisions about our naval and drilling operations would be subject to the vote of 162 other signatories, including Cuba, China and Russia.
While our sovereignty would be redistributed around the world, most of the funding for the massive LOST regulatory body would come from — you guessed it! — the United States. Forbes columnist Larry Bell reports that “as much as 7 percent of U.S. government revenue that is collected from oil and gas companies operating off our coast” would be meted out to “poorer, landlocked countries.” This confiscatory act of environmental justice would siphon billions, if not trillions, away from Americans. International royalties would be imposed; an international tribunal would be set up to mediate disputes.
There would be no opportunity for court appeals in the U.S.
LOST is just the latest waterlogged power grab by the Obama administration.

Do People Matter?

What was Ford’s advice? In 1926, he wrote My Life and Work, and in that book he stated, “Our help does not come from Washington, but from ourselves. The government is a servant and never should be anything but a servant.” 

Ford still did not want a government bailohat get attachec.ut, with all the strings t

Do People Matter?

by BURT FOLSOM on MAY 23, 2012

Henry Ford , Thomas Edison and John Burroughs
 in the "ubiquitous" Model T

Not according to some critics of free enterprise. Keynesian economist Robert Thomas once said, “Individual entrepreneurs, whether alone or as archetypes, don’t matter!” Thomas elaborated, “And indeed if they don’t matter, the reason, I suggest, is that the supply of entrepreneurs throughout American history, combined with the institutions that permitted–indeed fostered–intense competition, was sufficiently elastic to reduce the importance of any particular individual.”

In other words, if Henry Ford hadn’t come along and popularized the automobile, someone else right behind him would have done so in roughly the same way. Entrepreneurs are not particularly valuable, according to Robert Thomas. Without Ford, another mechanic would have “put a car in every garage.” Ford was merely in the right place at the right time.

If you believe that, then it logically follows that tax rates should be high. Why reward an entrepreneur for doing something now that someone else will do just as well very soon? In this view, government should be actively involved; bureaucrats can easily substitute for entrepreneurs, and the reward will go to the state, which can redistribute it perhaps more equally.
-more at link-

No Glue holding the EU together. Lloyd's of London preparing for euro collapse

Lloyd's of London preparing for euro collapse - Telegraph

The chief executive of the multi-billion pound Lloyd's of London has publicly admitted that the world's leading insurance market is prepared for a collapse in the single currency and has reduced its exposure "as much as possible" to the crisis-ridden continent.

By Andrew Cave

 27 May 2012

Richard Ward said the London market had put in place a contingency plan to switch euro underwriting to multi-currency settlement if Greece abandoned the euro.

In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph he also revealed that Lloyd's could have to take writedowns on its £58.9bn investment portfolio if the eurozone collapses.

Europe accounts for 18pc of Lloyd's £23.5bn of gross written premiums, mostly in France, Germany, Spain and Italy. The market also has a fledgling operation in Poland.

Lloyd's move comes as a major Franco-German provider of credit insurance for eurozone trade, Euler Hermes, said it was considering reducing cover for trade with Greece because of the risk the country might leave the eurozone.

When a company goes bust, it is often sparked by withdrawal of credit insurance for suppliers wanting to trade with it.

-more at link-

Where Everything is Below Average. The most boring man in the Nation (or maybe a tie with Al Gore).

Separated in test tubes

Not to mention, the least humorous!

Biting the Hand at NPR | The Weekly Standard

Patrick Cooke

May 25, 2012 1:34 PM

The successful have always been eyed with suspicion by the plain, decent old folk over at NPR, except for the once or twice a year when the alms cup comes out for a rattle or two. So it was a little astonishing to hear Garrison Keillor, the Clem Kadiddlehopper of the pubic airwaves, sing this smug little ditty, “Forever Dumb,” last Saturday night during NPR’s pledge week:

May you always be important
And cool and stylish too.
And be admired by others
And have people wait on you.

May the members of your fan club
Fill a great big stadium
May you stay forever dumb.

May you grow up to be beautiful
And very rich and slim
May God give you everything you want
Though you don’t believe in Him.

My you ever be successful
As you follow your own drum
May you stay forever dumb.

May your hands always be skillful
May your cars always swift
Oh a big red Maserati
With an automatic shift.

May you stick you finger in the pie
And always find the plum
May you stay forever dumb.

If you’d felt any inclination to reach for the phone and pledge, you probably had to at least stop and wonder why NPR would treat with derision those who are in the best position to give. Yes, the network’s thank you gift included the choice of a subscription to Newsweek or the New Yorker, but couldn’t decide. Too dumb, I guess. 

-go to link-