Silly Joanne Chesimard. If she had just served her time, she’d have tenure by now.
Europe is “bleeding out”. Youth unemployment? “59.1% of those under 25 are unemployed in Greece, 55.9% in Spain, 38.4% in Italy, 38.3% in Portugal, 26.5% in France.” More: “Hope and Change economies are crony capitalist systems which pick winners and losers. They maintain the status quo at all costs — and reward those who have captured government over those who innovate.”
So which is funnier, violence against women, or intimidating crime witnesses? Mountain Dew puts both in the same ad! Hilarity ensues! (Oh, and some people think it’s racist. It is, but not any more than a random gangsta rap video.)
People don’t like being bossed around by the political class. But that’s the Democratic Party’s entire model!
“We found 15 Trial Court cases, and 12 Appellate Court cases, where Shariah was found to be applicable in these particular cases. The facts are the facts: some judges are making decisions deferring to Shariah law even when those decisions conflict with Constitutional protections.”
Former New Mexico Democratic Gov. Bill Richardson says that Ted Cruz isn’t allowed to be a Hispanic because he opposes illegal alien amnesty. Maybe they should just declare that you can’t be Hispanic unless you’re a Democrat and be done with it.
Speaking of Cruz, here’s a piece in The New Republic that, when stripped of standard TNR talking points, boils down to “Yes, Ted Cruz could be elected President.”
Another day, another another 20 dead in an Islamist attack on a Christian church.
Once again the irreligious, bracing Pat Condell tackles another PC shibboleth, namely our giving Palestinian barbarism a free pass. Why? “Because we’re racists.”
Too broad a brush? Well, it is a shame that 90% of Palestinians give the other 10% a bad name…
Thomas Friedman hates the Keystone pipeline because the oil is dirty, but love China, where industry is a thousand time dirtier than here in the U.S. And where will that oil go if the pipeline isn’t built? China. Maybe Friedman just wants all the jobs to be in China. That, or actual checks from the Chinese government or their business subsidiaries, would explain an awful lot of Friedman’s writing over the last few years…
The degrees of broke-ness varies: from completely and utterly broke, like Greece or Italy; to wobbly, like the U.K., France, the U.S., or Japan; to getting poorer like Germany. But all of them are going to have to raise the percentage of gross domestic product they collect in tax — and many of them very significantly.
The U.S. deficit is more than 7% of GDP. The U.K.’s deficit is just as high. There is very little sign that spending cuts to close gaps of that magnitude are on the cards, nor is there any sign that growth will be sufficiently strong to make up the difference — certainly not in countries like the U.K. or Japan.
Huge sums of additional revenue will have to be raised.
Willie Sutton once famously remarked that he robbed banks because “that’s where the money is.”
In the same way, governments will look to raise more tax from companies because that’s where the money is.
Or they could, you know, actually cut spending…
I’ve not been following the Prenda Law case closely. Fortunately, Ken over at Popehat has. Exceptionally brief background: Scumbag copyright troll lawyers operate shakedown operation, filing dubious (at best) copyright infringement lawsuits. Then they compounded the problem by suing bloggers and lawyers in an attempt to silence them. As you might expect, that strategy isn’t working out very well for them… (Hat tip: Dwight)
Lots of larger pieces in various stage of construction, but rather than put them up when everyone is getting ready for Thanksgiving, here’s a quick LinkSwarm:
Former Sen. Warren Rudman dead at age 82. Gramm-Rudman-Hollings really worked at controlling the deficit. That’s why Democrats had to kill it.
Israel and Hamas agree to a ceasefire. Pretty much ensuring that we’ll go through this whole charade again a year or two down the road.
The Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco and Grain Millers Union, having been given a second chance by a federal judge, decided that the first hole in their foot just wasn’t big enough and decided to shoot again. Hostess is still dead.
Two weeks after wining reelection, and facing an FBI probe for corruption, Jesse Jackson, Jr. resigns. Like father like son.
First up, Unions kill Hostess. By calling a strike against a company that was already in bankruptcy, against the advice of the Teamsters, who had already taken a look at the Hostess books, the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union ensured that instead of a 6% pay cut, unionized workers would take a 100% pay cut. Way to go, unions!
Israel still seems to be gearing up for a ground offensive in Gaza. And by firing rockets at Tel Aviv, Hamas pretty much guarantees that the only faction in Israeli politics urging restraint will retink their position. “I get a lot less liberal when you want to kill me.”
Lefties are trying to boycott Papa Johns for daring to lay people off because of ObamaCare. “If this is anything like the Chick-fil-A buycott, and you want Papa John’s for dinner, you’d better get your order in now.” It’s amazing that any business in America ever has to declare bankruptcy, given there are so many liberals around who can tell them exactly how much profit they “need”…
Former general and former CIA head David Petraeus testifies on Benghazi. He says his report said the attack was launched by al Qaeda, but higher-ups in the Obama Administration deleted the reference. The more we hear about Benghazi, the more it appears that Fox News was right.
The biggest difference is that that back then, Egypt wasn’t run by Islamist assclowns.
This also gives me a chance to link to this totally off the hook article on Israel’s urban warfare tactics in Nablus in 2002. As far as I know, it’s the only useful application of French postmodern literary theory in the history of mankind…
Some people have wondered why Egypt’s high court, doing the military leadership’s bidding, just invalidated the Egyptian parliament, even though the Muslim Brotherhood’s popularity, though strong, seemed to be on the wan. I think the simplest explanation is not that they were afraid of losing their grip on Egyptian society (though that’s probably part of the equation), but that the Egypt’s military leadership prefers not be be killed. I don’t mean this in a metaphorical sense, I mean that there was real (and probably justified) fear that a government lead by Muslim Brotherhood would lead, in very short order, to the liquidation of the military leadership. I think they were facing not one but two existential threats.
First, as shown in Turkey, when a nation’s existing military leadership also acts as an independent power base, islamists are only willing to tolerate potential threats to their own rule as long as they have to. Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s islamist AKP has moved to put vast swathes of Turkey’s previously independent military leadership on trail for blocking Islamist aims in the past. Egypt’s military is just as strong a power center (albeit one considerably less scrupulous than Turkey’s); how long do you think it would take the Muslim Brotherhood to move against the military leadership after they had consolidated power? My guess is not long at all, and the military knew it too.
Second, if we take the Muslim Brotherhood at their word, it’s obvious they’re itching for another war against Israel. And why not? They regard the “Zionist Entity” as a literal affront against God, one that must be wiped off the face of the earth. Moreover, what better way to tighten control over the levers of governmental powers than with a war against a hated enemy? There are are all sorts of ways to use “emergency wartime decrees” to eliminate opposition figures and seize direct control of businesses and ministries when everyone’s focused on the military action.
And who would bear the brunt of any war against Israel? The hated military. Win, and members of the Muslim Brotherhood government are heroes to Muslims all over the world. Lose, and it could only be attributable to traitorous disloyalty by the military leadership, which would be immediately purged.
The Egyptian military knows it would lose any war against Israel for the foreseeable future (even discounting Israel’s likely nuclear weapons arsenal), and it knows the best way to prevent one is to prevent the Muslim Brotherhood from coming to power. Strangely enough, in this instance the Egyptian military leadership is actually acting in the best interests of the nation, even if the end result also happens to be saving their own hide.
Why ObamaCare can’t work: “It is a perverse but very real fact of life that the more complex and rich the system to be regulated, the less the ‘experts’ and the goo-goos have the political power to impose their vision on the regulatory process. The more carefully crafted a law needs to be, the more it is going to be full of lobby lollipops and sweat heart deals. A legislative body trying to write a health care law for a country like ours is like a neurosurgeon operating, drunk, with one hand holding a chainsaw and the other in a boxing glove.”
Paul Ryan endorses Mitt Romney. That’s a great pickup for him, and it eases, ever so slightly, my concerns that Romney will be a “big spending Republican” in the mode of Bush43 should he get elected.
Dwight notes a Hezbollah connection to the story of a chain of Austin bars that weren’t paying their employees what they were owed.
So a Hispanic Democrat shoots someone who might or might not have been assaulting him, and suddenly Texas Democrats are ready to drag gun control back on the agenda. Thanks Rep. Garnet Coleman (Democrat, Houston)! I was a little worried that gun owners might be not be motivated to go to the polls in Texas in 2012 (what with the House, Senate, and Governor’s mansion all under Republican control), but your proposal to end the castle doctrine is just the tonic we need to get them to the voting booth!
The King Street Patriots in Houston have a Democratic Judge rule against their tax-exempt status in a lawsuit brought by the Democratic Party. I wanted to point out the frivolous nature of this lawsuit, but Big Jolly already beat me to it.
A left-wing Irish documentary maker sets out to make a documentary about the plight of the Palestinians, but gets waylayed by those annoying facts, and instead decides to tell both sides of the story. Guess what? His friends aren’t interested. “The problem began when I resolved to come back with a film that showed both sides of the coin. Actually there are many more than two. Which is why my film is called Forty Shades of Grey. But only one side was wanted back in Dublin. My peers expected me to come back with an attack on Israel. No grey areas were acceptable.”
Israel and Hamas declare a ceasefire after four days of fighting. Honestly, maybe because I was traveling, or because I no longer feel the need to consult MSM news sources on a daily basis, I was actually unaware that there was slightly more violence than usual in the Middle East. The fact that Hamas cried uncle after a mere four days, despite the fact that Israel set it off by giving Hamas leader Zuhair al-Qaissi an express ticket to paradise, tells you that they must really have been getting their asses kicked by the IDF. Maybe Zuhair al-Qaissi really was important, or possibly Iran and Syria have had their hands too full to dole out the Qassam rockets with their customary generosity.
