Obama Beats Texas Inmate in Coon Skin Cap in WV Primary 59-41 Percent

Oh wait, that's his hair.

Story here.

Hm.

Unions Fail to Get Falk as Dem. Nominee v. Walker in WI

Politico has the story here:

Despite his late entry into the race, Barrett held a wide lead in the polls, aided in part by higher name recognition. Falk acknowledged that fact while campaigning in Milwaukee on Monday, saying she has always been the underdog.

“I have been all along because Tom [Barrett] just ran for governor a year ago,” she said.

Barrett’s victory came despite organized labor’s best efforts against him. Most of the state’s unions – including the AFL-CIO, the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the SEIU and the United Food and Commercial Workers – endorsed Falk.


The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel shows here the beating the unions' candidate received at the hands of Barrett, who will face  energized Republicans who turned out massively for Walker yesterday in the pro forma Republican primary:

David Stockman Agrees With John Bogle: Everything is Overvalued

In an interview reproduced here, I find myself pleasantly surprised because David Stockman says many agreeable things, especially this:

TGR: Will the mayhem stretch into the private sector?

DS: It will be everywhere. Once the bond market starts unraveling, all the other risk assets will start selling off like mad, too.

TGR: Does every sector collapse?

DS: If the bond market goes into a dislocation, it will spread like a contagion to all of the other asset markets. There will be a massive selloff.

I think everything in the world is overvalued—stocks, bonds, commodities, currencies. Too much money printing and debt expansion drove the prices of all asset classes to artificial, non-economic levels. The danger to the world is not classic inflation or deflation of goods and services; it's a drastic downward re-pricing of inflated financial assets.

Mourdock Creams Lugar in Indiana, But is he a Conservative?

Murdock once supported the Fairness Doctrine, of all things, way back in 1992, according to this story. The source cited is National Review.

And he's supposedly soft on sanctions against employers who employ illegals. No source named.

We'll see. He'll have to defeat Democrat Joe Donnelly first though.

Anyway, that squish Lugar is history.

The Refrain in Spain: "hagamos como islandia"

"Do as Iceland"!

Just say . . .

 

North Korean Camp 14 Escapee Hooked in Stomach, Hung Over Fire

From the London Evening Standard, here, which details some of the experiences of the only known person to escape the hell-hole known as North Korea, to which Jimmy Carter recently sent condolences on the death of the little monster responsible for the crime:

Shin’s conception had been arranged by the guards. They chose his mother and father, Shin Gyung Sub, as prizes for each other in a “reward” marriage. The couple were allowed to sleep together for five nights and then Shin’s father was allowed to visit his family only a few times a year. Their eldest son, Shin He Geun, was born in 1974, Shin arrived eight years later.

Park Yong Chul was a well-travelled North Korean who’d enjoyed a life of relative luxury before arriving at Camp 14 in 2004. Shin was instructed to befriend Park — and extract a confession. Through him, Shin learned about the existence of other countries, televisions, computers but mostly, he learned about food. Park described chicken, pork and beef, leading Shin to make his first free decision: he chose not to snitch on Park, instead hatching a plan for them to escape together. “Hearing about the food he’d eaten in the outside world was the main trigger,” recalls Shin. “I wanted to eat that kind of food — things unimaginable within the camp.”

Park was electrocuted during the escape as he squeezed through the electric fence. Shin suffered only burns, a small price after years of torture. His body bears many scars — his finger was chopped off by guards who also stuck a hook through his stomach and suspended him over a fire.

The Triumph of Newspeak in the EU: Spending is Austerity

The only voice which doesn't whine in the language of Newspeak appears to be Angela Merkel's in Germany. For the rest, the plain record of increased spending on the failed EU welfare state experiment gets called austerity.

Investors.com puts it best, here:

Austerity? Spending has boomed in the EU over the last decade. During the 2000s, EU member nations collectively boosted government outlays by 62%. Average government spending by EU nations today stands at about 49.2% of GDP — vs. 44.8% in 2000.

On its own website, the EU itself ridicules the notion of government austerity as a "myth."

"National budgets are NOT decreasing their spending, they are increasing it," the EU says, noting that in 2011, 23 of the 27 nations in the EU increased spending. This year, 24 of 27 will do so.

Did that decade-long spending increase boost GDP growth? No. During the 2000s, average annual GDP growth in the EU fell to 1.2% from 2.2% in the 1990s.

So the idea that Europeans are "tired" of austerity is false. You can't be tired of something you haven't tried. This is why an exasperated German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Monday she'll continue to demand that other countries make real cuts in spending.

Election 2012: Obama Hits The Rubber Puppy Circuit

Greater Europe Has 8 of 10 Highest Taxed Incomes

Showing highest marginal income tax rate and income level at which it begins:

10. Ireland, 48.0 percent + social security 4 percent, $43,900

09. Finland, 49.2 percent, $91,000

08. England, 50.0 percent + social security 12 percent, $231,000

07. Japan, 40.0 percent + 10 percent municipal + 5 percent social security, $217,000

06. Belgium, 50.0 percent + social security 13 percent + municipal 11 percent, $46,900

05. Austria, 50.0 percent + social security 18 percent, $80,000

04. Netherlands, 52.0 percent, $74,500

03. Denmark, 55.4 percent, $76,000

02. Sweden, 56.6 percent + social security 7 percent, $81,000

01. Aruba (Netherlands), 58.95 percent, $165,000 

The slideshow and commentary at CNBC.com is viewable here.

China Dries and Pulverizes Abortions For Stamina Pills

Barbarism is alive and well in the world.

So-called advanced societies like the United States abort over a million children a year, where its president views babies as a punishment. In China it's more like 13 million a year, and many of those end up in a dried and pulverized form in pills which are sold on the lucrative stamina market.

Nowhere do I read in the gruesome stories here and here that this amounts to cannibalism, but that's what it is, pure and simple, and America and the world relies on this barbaric country for most of its cheap manufactures.

Forward!

Progress!

Aging American Leftist: Social Security is Unaffordable

One Janet Daley, formerly of Berkeley, California, purportedly also a former leftist, in the UK Telegraph here:

Relying on the free market to support a vast system of entitlements (whichever of the two you choose to make your first priority) is not sustainable. The market economy simply cannot afford the enormous cost of the social security programmes that are now regarded as politically untouchable in Europe and in the US – as both of their political elites are painfully discovering.

Mark Steyn: Elizabeth Fauxcahontas Crockagawea Warren

Elizabeth Talking Bull

Here:

Alas, the actual original marriage license does not list Great-Great-Great-Gran’ma as Cherokee, but let’s cut Elizabeth Fauxcahontas Crockagawea Warren some slack here. She couldn’t be black. She would if she could, but she couldn’t. But she could be 1/32nd Cherokee, and maybe get invited to a luncheon with others of her kind — “people who are like I am,” 31/32nds white, and they can all sit around celebrating their diversity together. She is a testament to America’s melting pot, composite pot, composting pot, whatever.

That's why they pay him the big bucks.

(image source)

PM Cameron Talks Up Sodomy While UK Takes On Water

Cameron, looking the wrong direction

In the words of the UK Telegraph here, after Cameron's so-called conservatism took a drubbing in the recent elections:

Mr Cameron is a charismatic leader who has refreshed his party, and made it far more comfortable with the modern world. But his political strategy and positioning are failing to deliver. By making a totem of issues such as overseas aid and gay marriage, he has alienated core voters without winning new ones. The result of adhering to a Westminster definition of the centre ground, and trying to be all things to all people, is that the Conservative Party now appears to lack the message, the focus, and the strategy to win a majority. ...

What [the voters] care about – and what Mr Cameron must preoccupy himself with – are earthier issues: fixing the economy, cutting the cost of living, getting tough on crime and welfare dependency, restricting immigration, standing up to Europe on human rights.

Such a strategy is being dismissed as a “lurch to the Right”. But what it actually represents is a lurch towards the public, a fresh offering that appeals to hard-pressed families and striving workers – to those looking for a reason to vote Tory and thus far failing to find one.

Shills for ObamaCare Adopt Orwell's Newspeak: Mandates are Liberty!

An astute commenter on "Yes, the Health-Care Mandate Is About Liberty" by Jonathan Cohn and David A. Strauss at Blooomberg.com here captured the Orwellian Newspeak with this pithy formulation:

Mandatory Arbitration: Big Business' Latest Weapon Against The People

And they don't hoodwink you into it, either. You sign up for it.

Susan Antilla has all the details for Bloomberg, here:

The McMahon decision was damaging enough for the impact it had on individual brokerage customers, who tell their stories about fraud, misrepresentation and churning behind closed doors where the public -- including reporters -- isn’t welcome. ...

“It means that all sorts of scams against individuals, however large, are very unlikely to come to the attention of the media and the public,” says F. Paul Bland Jr., a senior attorney at the public-interest law firm Public Justice in Washington.

Wall Street may have been first to catch on to the benefits of mandatory arbitration, but Bland worries that the closed-door trials are spreading to industries from retailing to homebuilding. “The silence and secrecy that surrounds arbitration is extremely harmful to the country,” he says.

These days, employers -- Manpower Inc. and Nordstrom Inc. among them -- require new hires to give up their rights to court before a fresh-faced recruit can check in for orientation. And consumers can forget about opening a Netflix account, signing a mobile-phone contract, or putting a loved one into most big-name nursing homes unless they are willing to give up their rights to go to court. Buying a Starbucks gift card? You are agreeing to mandatory arbitration of any fraud or misrepresentation by the company. ...

In April 2011, the court dealt a new blow to consumers and employees in a case known as AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion. AT&T had pitched a deal to woo new mobile-phone customers by offering free phones, but it turned out the freebie came with a $30.22 bill for “taxes.” Vincent and Liza Concepcion tried to bring a class-action lawsuit on behalf of all the other consumers who took AT&T’s deal. But the court said that when the couple signed the customer agreement, they gave up their right not only to sue, but also to a class action even in arbitration.

In the year since the Concepcion decision, lower courts have trashed dozens of cases in which consumers or employees were trying to sue as a group. The National Labor Relations Board pushed back against the impact the Concepcion decision might have on employment class actions, ruling in January that it’s a violation of federal labor law to make workers give up the right to pursue group claims. That decision probably will be challenged in court.

About 25 percent of U.S. employees are covered by mandatory-arbitration clauses, says Alexander J.S. Colvin, an associate professor of labor relations and conflict resolution at Cornell University. He figures the number will grow as a result of the Concepcion case.

UK Guardian None Too Happy Sarkozy Played Muslim Card

In an editorial, here, about the one and only debate between Sarkozy and Hollande:

At one point Mr Sarkozy plumbed new depths in a campaign which had already turned xenophobic to recapture ground from Marine Le Pen. This was where he explained that he was not bothered about Canadian or Norwegian immigrants getting the vote, but Algerian, Malian and Nigerian ones – the Muslim ones of course: "Community tensions come from whom and they come from where?" This was the Sarkozy of old, the former interior minister of raw political ambition who earned the loathing of his colleagues by calling delinquents rabble, and promising to cleanse minority suburbs with a Kärcher high-pressure water hose.

What's 1/16 Cherokee + 1/32 Cherokee?

Two complete nuts:

Ward LeRoy Churchill

Elizabeth Warren

Michigan Public Libraries Prefer Liberal Bill Press to Conservative Deneen Borelli

ranks 6637 at amazon

available from 8 libraries

ranks 1994 at amazon

available from 2 libraries

Irrational Exuberance in French Real Estate, as in USA, Began in Late 1990s

And a long, steady slide back down is in the cards.

So Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the UK Telegraph, here:

The price-income ratio was stable from the 1960s to the late 1990s, before exploding over the past 12 years as a perfect storm of demographics, state sweetners and cheap credit led to a 12-year blow-off.

There are parallels with Spain and America but Mr Sabatier said the French twist is a replay of the early 1930s when investors fled stocks after 1929 and rotated into "safe" property. Hence the paradox of rising prices during the Depression. The strange boom did not end until premier Pierre Laval cut rent ceilings in 1935, triggering a long slide.

"Laval's policy change was the catalyst. The same could happen now as austerity forces brutal measures," he said. An array of market props are eroding, including tax relief on some mortages and certain capital gains. ...

A housing slump would hammer the economy just as long-delayed austerity begins in earnest. Property makes up 65pc of French household wealth, compared with 57pc in Germany, 39pc in Japan and 27pc in the US.

Under Obama 5.4 Million New Americans Take SSDI, Doubling Total to 10.8 Million

For the full story by John Merline and all the data, go here at Investors.com.

Nothing is said about the cost of this exodus to dependency, which other stories have said is $200 billion annually, but Merline does mention that the funds designated for the purpose of disability benefits will run out in 2018, six years from now.