Corruption can go just so far! Mikhail Gorbachev calls for a new vote in Russia

Today, Gorbachev looks more like a Khrushchev, but talks more as a Reagan.

Mikhail Gorbachev calls for a new vote in Russia - Yahoo! News

Gorbachev told the Interfax news agency that authorities must hold a fresh election or deal with a rising tide of discontent.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's United Russia party won less than 50 percent of Sunday's vote, a steep fall from its earlier two-thirds majority, according to preliminary results. But opposition parties and international observers said the vote was marred by vote-rigging, including alleged ballot-box stuffing and false voter rolls.

"More and more people are starting to believe that the election results are not fair," he told Interfax. "I believe that ignoring public opinion discredits the authorities and destabilizes the situation."

Gorbachev added that authorities "must admit that there have been numerous falsifications and ballot stuffing."

Sunday's parliamentary vote suggested Russians are tiring of Putin and his United Russia party, which has dominated all other political forces in Russia for the past dozen years and earned a reputation for corruption.

-read on at link-

Richmond's intimidation of tea party deserves forceful opposition

Richmond Tea Party | Richmond's intimidation of tea party deserves forceful opposition | The Daily Caller
former Congressman (R-GA) 12-5-11 by Bob Barr

It should come as no surprise that some people are biased against the tea party movement. We have seen it in the media, which often portrays tea partiers as anti-government naysayers and rabble-rousers with nothing better to do than complain. At the same time, the so-called “Occupy Wall Street” whiners have largely been given a pass.

Media bias is one thing. Government officials using the power of their official positions to punish tea party organizations, however, is quite another matter, one that ought to concern all Americans who respect the rule of law.

Consider the case of Richmond, Virginia’s tea party group.

In recent months, the Richmond Tea Party has paid thousands of dollars in fees to the municipal government in order to hold rallies, even as it noted that so-called “Occupy” protesters were receiving quite different and preferential treatment from those same government offices. The Richmond Tea Party decided to draw attention to this disparate treatment, and for this, it has been targeted by city tax officials threatening an official audit of the organization’s books and records.

The dispute began when members of the Richmond Tea Party pointed out that “Occupy Richmond” protesters were illegally camping in the city’s Kanawha Plaza. Yet, when the Richmond Tea Party sought to use the park, it was charged some $8,500 in fees, permits and security costs. Not only did the city fail to demand any similar fees from the Occupiers, but Mayor Dwight Jones expressed sympathy with them, going so far as to liken their cause to the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2011/12/05/richmonds-intimidation-of-tea-party-deserves-forceful-opposition/#ixzz1fnwJDNYG

"I know kids, let's put on a show"-NAACP thinks it's a 3rd world nation so it warns black and Hispanic Americans could lose right to vote, yeah, right

Wasn't Moammar Gadhafi the UN Human Rights Commissioner?

NAACP warns black and Hispanic Americans could lose right to vote | World news | guardian.co.uk

Ed Pilkington 12-5-11

The largest civil rights group in America, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), is petitioning the UN over what it sees as a concerted effort to disenfranchise black and Latino voters ahead of next year's presidential election.

The organisation will this week present evidence to the UN high commissioner on human rights of what it contends is a conscious attempt to "block the vote" on the part of state legislatures across the US. Next March the NAACP will send a delegation of legal experts to Geneva to enlist the support of the UN human rights council.

The NAACP contends that the America in the throes of a consciously conceived and orchestrated move to strip black and other ethnic minority groups of the right to vote. William Barber, a member of the association's national board, said it was the "most vicious, co-ordinated and sinister attack to narrow participation in our democracy since the early 20th century".

In its report, Defending Democracy: Confronting Modern Barriers to Voting Rights in America, the NAACP explores the voter suppression measures taking place particularly in southern and western states.

-read on, if you can stand it, at the link-

The explosive growth of higher ed costs are wasted. Higher Ed Jumps The Shark

Higher Ed Jumps The Shark | Via Meadia

December 5, 2011 Walter Russell Mead

There are many things American higher ed does very well, but providing job-related training at a reasonable price isn’t one of them. The explosive growth of higher ed costs (driven by factors including administrative bloat and mission creep, government mandates, the guild system for faculty, and a fixation on the research university model) combined with the recession has brought the system to a point where the subject of radical change can no longer be avoided.

In a Sunday piece in the Washington Examiner, law professor Glenn Reynolds (better known in the blogosphere as the indefatigable Instapundit) makes some important points about how the system could change. Reynolds makes some thoughtful practical suggestions, and also gets right to the heart of a problem that goes farther than higher ed:

When you artificially pump up the supply of something (whether it’s currency or diplomas), the value drops. The reason why a bachelor’s degree on its own no longer conveys intelligence and capability is that the government decided that as many people as possible should have bachelor’s degrees.There’s something of a pattern here. The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle class people.

But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay in, the middle class.

Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them. One might as well try to promote basketball skills by distributing expensive sneakers.

Professional basketball players have expensive sneakers, but — TV commercials notwithstanding — it’s not the shoes that make them good at dunking.

-more at link-

Some people are more equal than others. The Poison of Multiculturalism

The Poison of Multiculturalism | FrontPage Magazine

By Bruce Bawer On December 5, 2011

If you want a pretty good example of just why multiculturalism is so poisonous, here’s one for you.

I live in Norway. Here, as elsewhere in Europe, there reside innumerable immigrants from the Muslim world who despise Western values, reject sexual equality, and affirm primitive patriarchal codes and concepts of “honor” that condemn people (mostly females) to death for infractions that neither you nor I would even recognize as infractions. Nonetheless these individuals enjoy Norwegian residency, and in some cases Norwegian citizenship, which some of them were granted because they claimed asylum (most likely on specious grounds, as demonstrated by the fact that many, if not most, of them return regularly to the countries from which they supposedly “fled”), and which others were granted because they married Norwegian residents (usually their own cousins, whom they married for no other reason than to acquire Western residency).

Every now and then there come along people from the Muslim world who are legitimate asylum-seekers – people who really would be in danger if they returned to their homelands, people to whom Western countries should feel a moral obligation to grant residency, and people from whose presence those countries would actually benefit, precisely because they’re people who will appreciate freedom more than most of the rest of us do. To put it another way, they’re the kind of immigrants who, generation by generation, have renewed the American spirit and the American dream by reminding those of us whose ancestors preceded them just how precious a thing freedom is.

Meet “Azad.” He’s a gay Iraqi who, according to an article at the website of NRK, the Norwegian national broadcasting system, has been in a committed relationship since 2006 with somebody named Odd Arne Henriksen. (I don’t know either of these guys, though my partner, after looking at the picture of the two of them that accompanies the article, says he’s seen Henriksen around town a number of times. Oslo is a pretty small city.)

For years, apparently, “Azad” has lived in Norway without causing any problems or being a burden on the state. But now an appellate court has ordered that he be deported to Iraq. If he goes back there, he says, “my clan will kill me.” Indeed, the court recognizes that if it becomes known in Iraq that “Azad” is gay, he risks “exclusion, isolation, and physical punishment.” (In fact, he risks much worse.) Nonetheless the court has ruled that “Azad,” in the words of NRK’s report, “must comply with his homeland’s sociocultural norms.”

Let me repeat that: he “must comply with his homeland’s sociocultural norms.”

-read more at link-

The Muslim Brotherhood's murder boys take over - Egypt’s Descent

Israel and Copts Beware! And we are always the next infidels!

The Face of the Muslim Brotherhood Unmasked.

Egypt’s Descent - Mark Steyn - National Review Online

12-3-11

Two-thirds of the Arab world’s largest nation is voting for sharia.

I’ve been alarmed by the latest polls. No, not from Iowa and New Hampshire, although they’re unnerving enough. It’s the polls from Egypt. Foreign policy has not played a part in the U.S. presidential campaign, mainly because we’re so broke that the electorate seems minded to take the view that if government is going to throw trillions of dollars down the toilet they’d rather it was an Al Gore–compliant Kohler model in Des Moines or Poughkeepsie than an outhouse in Waziristan. Alas, reality does not arrange its affairs quite so neatly, and the world that is arising in the second decade of the 21st century is increasingly inimical to American interests, and likely to prove even more expensive to boot.

In that sense, Egypt is instructive. Even in the giddy live–from–Tahrir Square heyday of the “Arab Spring” and “Facebook Revolution,” I was something of a skeptic. Back in February, I chanced to be on Fox News with Megyn Kelly within an hour or so of Mubarak’s resignation. Over on CNN, Anderson Cooper was interviewing telegenic youthful idealists cooing about the flowering of a new democratic Egypt. Back on Fox, sourpuss Steyn was telling Megyn that this was “the unraveling of the American Middle East” and the emergence of a post-Western order in the region. In those days, I was so much of a pessimist I thought that in any election the Muslim Brotherhood would get a third of the votes and be the largest party in parliament. By the time the actual first results came through last week, the Brothers had racked up 40 percent of the vote — in Cairo and Alexandria, the big cities wherein, insofar as they exist, the secular Facebooking Anderson Cooper types reside. In second place were their principal rivals, the Nour party, with up to 15 percent of the ballots. “Nour” translates into English as “the Even More Muslim Brotherhood.” As the writer Barry Rubin pointed out, if that’s how the urban sophisticates vote, wait till you see the upcountry results. By the time the rural vote emerges from the Nile Delta and Sinai early next month, the hard-core Islamists will be sitting pretty. In the so-called Facebook Revolution, two-thirds of the Arab world’s largest nation is voting for the hard, cruel, bigoted, misogynistic song of sharia.

The short 90-year history of independent Egypt is that it got worse. Mubarak’s Egypt was worse than King Farouk’s Egypt, and what follows from last week’s vote will be worse still. If you’re a Westernized urban woman, a Coptic Christian, or an Israeli diplomat with the goons pounding the doors of your embassy, you already know that. The Kingdom of Egypt in the three decades before the 1952 coup was flawed and ramshackle and corrupt, but it was closer to a free-ish pluralist society than anything in the years since. In 1923, its finance minister was a man called Joseph Cattaui, a member of parliament, and a Jew. Couldn’t happen today. Mr. Cattaui’s grandson wrote to me recently from France, where the family now lives. In the unlikely event the forthcoming Muslim Brotherhood government wish to appoint a Jew as finance minister, there are very few left available. Indeed, Jews are so thin on the ground that those youthful idealists in Tahrir Square looking for Jews to club to a pulp have been forced to make do with sexually assaulting hapless gentiles like the CBS News reporter Lara Logan. It doesn’t fit the narrative, so even Miss Logan’s network colleagues preferred to look away. We have got used to the fact that Egypt is now a land without Jews. Soon it will be a land without Copts. We’ll get used to that, too.

-more at link-

Putin - too much the dictator of the past - Russia still remembers the one-party system that ruined it.

http://hosted2.ap.org/ALDEC/TDWorld/Article_2011-12-04-EU-Russia-Election/id-f6ee7c6de7654f5098d520d467eb4af5

Dec. 4, 2011 11:36 AM ET

Russia's ruling party wary as nation votes

MOSCOW (AP) — Russians cast their ballots with muted enthusiasm in parliamentary elections Sunday, a vote opinion polls suggest could reduce the strength of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's party. Rival parties and election monitors, which have suffered from government crackdowns, alleged significant violations at the polls.

Although Putin and his United Russia party have dominated Russian politics for more than a decade, popular discontent appears to be growing with Putin's strongman style, widespread official corruption and the gap between ordinary Russians and the country's floridly super-rich.

United Russia holds a two-thirds majority in the outgoing State Duma. But a survey last month by the independent Levada Center polling agency indicated the party could get only about 53 percent of the vote in this election, depriving it of the number of seats necessary to change the constitution unchallenged.

Putin wants United Russia — which many critics now deride as the "party of crooks and thieves" — to do well in the parliamentary election to help pave the way for his return to the presidency in a vote now three months away. He previously served as president in 2000-2008.

He has warned that a parliament with a wide array of parties would lead to political instability and claimed that Western governments want to undermine the election. A Western-funded election-monitoring group has come under strong official pressure and its Web site was incapacitated by hackers on Sunday.

-more at link-

Russia's Putin and party suffer election blow

By Timothy Heritage and Ralph Boulton

MOSCOW | Sun Dec 4, 2011 6:54pm EST

(Reuters) - Russian voters have dealt Vladimir Putin's ruling party a heavy blow by cutting its parliamentary majority in an election that showed growing unease with his domination of the country as he prepares to reclaim the presidency.

Incomplete results showed Putin's United Russia was struggling even to win 50 percent of the votes in Sunday's election, compared with more than 64 percent four years ago. Opposition parties said even that outcome was inflated by fraud.

Although Putin is still likely to win a presidential election in March, Sunday's result could dent the authority of the man who has ruled for almost 12 years with a mixture of hardline security policies, political acumen and showmanship but was booed and jeered after a martial arts bout last month.

United Russia had 49.94 percent of the votes after results were counted in 70 percent of voting districts for the election to the State Duma, the lower house of parliament. Exit polls had also put United Russia below 50 percent.

-more at link-

There was no reason (other than political graft) for Kyoto in the first place -There's No Appetite For Kyoto II

Here we have more graft loving delegates to another phony UN-sponsored World Climate Change Conference to discuss, again, combating climate change by reduction of carbon emissions, which may be a cause of global warming.

The real purpose is to extort funds from the industrialized nations in the guise of saving the planet from themselves.

As for carbon based global warming, caused by man's carbon-dioxide emissions, this has long been known and found, both scientifically and historically, that increases in atmospheric carbon-dioxide follows rather than precedes interglacial warming periods.

This fact has been ignored, conveniently, along with the most recent "little ice-age" of the 13th - 14th centuries. How did past inter-glacial global warming periods occur without man's industrialization to cause it?

The earth has done with its climate atmospherics whatever the factors of its geology and surrounding universe dictate with or without the intercession of mankind. The less we do about this, the better for most of us, except for those with undue economic and rent-seeking personal interests.

The best solution would be to allow individuals to make their own decisions without the political influences of the corrupted world government's delegates involved. The globe will be following the stars that were set in their courses long before man's distant ancestors crawled out of its primeval goo. ♘

RealClearMarkets - There's No Appetite For Kyoto II

By Diana Furchtgott-Roth December 1, 2011

This week in Durban, South Africa, delegates from 194 countries are meeting at the UN-sponsored World Climate Change Conference to discuss, again, combating climate change by reduction of carbon emissions, which may be a cause of global warming.

One topic on their agenda is the fate of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which was meant to curb our carbon emissions and which expires in 2012.

Their object: to persuade America and other industrialized countries to sign up for another round of greenhouse gas reductions, and to set up a $100 billion fund to help developing countries reduce their emissions. Early indications are that the meeting will achieve little.

At Monday's opening, South Africa's International Relations Minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, president of the conference, rolled out the usual boilerplate. She told the delegates that she was hoping for "a balanced, fair, and credible outcome, with multilateralism, environmental integrity, fairness, and common, but differential responsibility."

Christiana Figueres of Costa Rica, the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, followed her, declaring that "This meeting needs to take the next decisive steps in the global response to climate change."

Ms. Figueres lectured, "To be a success, Durban needs to address further commitments of developed countries under the Kyoto Protocol."

The Durban gathering is another effort to combat global warming by reducing carbon consumption, an approach that could dampen economic activity just when there is risk of a new European recession.

There is another way to address the potential problem: geoengineering. It would be less disruptive of business activity, less threatening to employment, and it promises to be relatively inexpensive.

Most important, it would reduce warming even if certain countries who shall remain nameless did not agree to reduce their emissions.

Recall that the Kyoto Protocol set limits on 37 industrialized countries' emissions of greenhouse gases, chiefly carbon dioxide. Signatory governments agreed to reduce their emissions by at least 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2008 to 2012.

-more of this at the link-

STUDENTS!? Who Said Those Embassy-Storming Thugs in Tehran Were ‘Students’?

"STUDENTS!"

The Rosett Report » Who Said Those Embassy-Storming Thugs in Tehran Were ‘Students’?

By Claudia Rosett On November 29, 2011

In a must-read editorial, the Wall Street Journal corrects its brethren MSM on the identity of the thugs who just stormed the British embassy in Tehran — breaking windows, burning the British flag, ransacking offices, trashing a portrait of the Queen, and terrorizing the staff. The Journalnotes ^[1] that the attack was not impromptu. “Police stood by, and Iranian state television broadcast events live.”

But, continues the editorial, “By some strange reflex, Western media insisted the attackers were ‘students.’ To Iranians who know better, they were the basij militia, the regime’s first line of defense. These thugs were called out to brutally put down the 2009 Green Revolution, a genuine student-led uprising.”

Exactly. So what was this strange reflex that caused so many members of the Western media — including CNN, CBS, ABC, the BBC, USA Today, the NY Daily News and even Fox — to describe them as “students”? I’m no mind reader, but I’m skeptical that in this case it was anything as deliberate as some sort of multicultural, values-neutral bias. More likely it was something at least as bad, and maybe worse. My guess is that they let Iranian propagandists do their thinking for them, pulling the “student” label straight off the Iranian broadcasts of the event.

-read on about 'students'-

Undo what Congress has done! Remy's "Light Bulb Song"; Nick Gillespie Talking Bulb Bans on Stossel

"As one lamp serves to dispel a thousand years of darkness, so one flash of wisdom destroys ten thousand years of ignorance." Zen quote

Remy's "Light Bulb Song"; Nick Gillespie Talking Bulb Bans on Stossel - Hit & Run : Reason Magazine

December 3, 2011

Nick Gillespie, Meredith Bragg & . Remy

Remy mourns the impending loss of his beloved incandescent light bulbs with a song set to familiar music.

Written and performed by Remy and produced by Meredith Bragg.