Feds Try To Establish Link Between Opposition To ObamaCare And Hutaree Conspiracy

The Hutaree were arrested within days of the passing of ObamaCare and in the wake of protests over it around the country, alleged threats of violence and even isolated acts of vandalism.

To some, such as Monica Crowley and to us, it seemed the arrests were conveniently timed to quell the anger, a shot across the bow of the people that they should expect to be met by federal force if necessary.

And what is ObamaCare if not federal force? You will either buy health insurance, or pay a fine.

The Detroit Free Press has the full story here, with this interesting detail:

According to trial testimony, health care is one of the issues that fired up the Hutaree.

As defendant Joshua Stone said in one recording played in court Monday: "I look forward to us shootin' this fall ... cause if they push that health care, we're goin' in."

The Stock Market: Bernanke's Fed Invites You To Look, But You Really Shouldn't

The Many Say 'Snuck In', The Few Say 'Sneaked In', But No One Calls It Dishonest

Least of all the sneaker, indeed quite the opposite, here:

Valdez snuck into the U.S., from Mexico, as a teenager and found work picking grapes. He got amnesty during the Reagan administration. Today he owns a vineyard management company and the winery. “This is the beauty of the U.S. --if you’re a hard worker and good and honest you can do it,” he said.

His wine made it to The White House in 2010.

Voter ID Laws Are Under Attack By Obama: Fraud Is Easy In 19 States, DC And Territories

The latest example of fraud is in Vermont (story here).

There is an excellent interactive graphic map showing the status of voter ID requirements, and pending, passed and challenged legislation throughout the US and its territories at the website of the National Conference of State Legislatures, which you can use by going here:

Bank Failures Since 2008 Have Cost The FDIC Deposit Insurance Fund $83 Billion

Based on data gathered here.

The three worst months of the crisis were July 2008, August 2009, and April 2010 when the FDIC's Deposit Insurance Fund had to shell out $8.8 billion, $7.5 billion and $9.4 billion respectively.

Interactive Maps of US Bank Failures Since 2008

PortalSeven.com/banks/ here has outstanding bank failure data for every year and every state during the crisis, and before.

Here's an example showing the twelve failures in Michigan from 2008 to date (Georgia and Florida have had the most failures, with 77 and 60 respectively), with the majority concentrated around Detroit:

In Michigan 18 more banks remain on an unofficial list of banks with problems, based on publicly available information. The Feds do not disclose their list of banks with problems, for obvious reasons.

In April 2008 Obama Said High Gas Prices Were A Huge Problem, Bordering On Crisis

It's six minutes long, but worth listening to now because Obama was complaining then about $3.60 a gallon being nearly a crisis. Four years later we're knocking on the door of $4.00 a gallon, and probably higher, which I'm sure he'd say borders on a catastrophe if he were not in charge.

See it here, from a speech in Indianapolis on April 25, 2008:

Obama Withholds Disaster Funds From Republican Southern Illinois

Harrisburg, IL, in Saline County not only didn't get John McCain for president in 2008, now it's not going to get disaster funds from FEMA after the recent tornado flattened the joint.

Gee, I wonder why?

Lots of counties in southern Illinois, including Saline, went for Republican John McCain in 2008 (in blue).

(source)

Story here: seven dead, 100 injured, 100 homes destroyed, hundreds more damaged.

Fix it yourself.

Norway's AUF Leader Eskil Pedersen Fled Utoya Like A Coward While Breivik Shot Youths

So charges "Norway, Israel and the jews" on March 5, 2012 here:

But Eskil Pedersen is not the most solid man in the world – a few minutes after the dreadful shooting started at Utøya on July 22, he and 8 other leaders who were in charge of the safety of the many hundreds of fantastic kids who participated in the traditional summer camp, took the official AUF ferry, which easily could have picked up and saved another 41 frightened and injured kids who were hiding amid rocks and under trees to avoid being killed. This they did as owners of small boats came to the rescue, subjecting themselves to lethal danger in order to pick up kids who in their desperation were swimming across the fiord to escape bullets. Rather than help picking up the kids, they took the decision to go further out the fiord, away from land, even as kids were seen swimming in the waters.

One Year Out, Radiation in Futaba Japan 5 km from Nuke Accident Remains Dangerous

Here's a screen shot from Fukushima Diary showing recent, very high radiation readings measured at ground level and in a car in Futaba town, 5 km north and west from the melted-down reactors at Fukushima:

If you reduced a typical American's exposure to radiation in a year from all sources, including medical and flight sources, to an hourly level it would be 0.7 microsieverts per hour. The air level in the car to the left is nearly 45.0, and next to the soil 518.2, nearly 12 times worse, both far in excess of safe. Just breathing the air there for less than two years would give you more than a single lifetime's exposure.

(source)

Here's a map showing the nuke plant on the coast at the lower right and Futaba's Town Office to the northwest of it marked by the green arrow:

The Last Real American?

Congressman Joe Wilson (SC-2)

The Opposite of Transparency: Obama Regime Claims GSEs Exempt from FOIA

From an editorial on the subject here:

Judicial Watch sought those documents because the FHFA claimed in a separate lawsuit against the 17 firms that losses on securities were caused by material misrepresentations the firms made to Fannie and Freddie. Finance industry experts claim Fannie and Freddie officials were more than sufficiently knowledgeable about the mortgage industry to realize the risks involved in such securities. By putting all Fannie and Freddie documents about such transactions beyond the reach of FOIA requesters like Judicial Watch, the Obama administration is making it difficult, if not impossible, for independent evaluators to determine who bears responsibilities for the losses [$150 billion and climbing] now being covered by taxpayers.

Adam Smith: Crony Capitalism is a Powerful Force Against Freedom

From Sheldon Richman, here, quoting Adam Smith:

"The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order [that is, 'those who live by profit'], ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it."

Smith grew up under mercantilism and knew well of what he wrote. America grew up largely under mercantilism and its cousin, Hamiltonian-Lincolnian corporatism. In this respect advocates of the freed market should embrace Smith’s understanding of political economy: that a powerful force against freedom emanates from where they might least expect to find it.

Worst Employment Recession Since WW2: After 4 Years, Jobs Recovery Not in Sight

The unemployment report yesterday shows some job gains, but the overall rate of unemployment remains unchanged from the month before at 8.3 percent, and jobs recovered have retraced only a small portion of the territory lost.

In every other jobs recession since the Second World War jobs recovered to the starting point in every case but one within 2.7 years. Bush's relatively mild job recession took 3.9 years to fully recover.

We are 4.1 years out and job losses are still at the severe depths last reached in the recessions of 1948 and 1957, as shown here.

America once knew how to bounce back quickly.

Not anymore.

Bank Failure Friday: The 13th in 2012. FDIC Covered Institutions Decline 13 Percent.

# 13 was New City Bank, Chicago, Illinois, costing the FDIC $17.4 million. No buyers for this one.

As of this date, FDIC coverage extends to 7,359 bank and savings institutions.

When IndyMac Bank of Pasadena, CA, failed in July 2008, there were 8,494 insured institutions.

The number of banks covered by the FDIC has thus contracted by over 13 percent in consequence of the depression of 2008-2009.

It took until March 2009 to complete the sale of IndyMac, which was originally estimated to cost the FDIC between $4 billion and $8 billion. In the end, its failure cost the FDIC $10.7 billion.

Justice is blind to every loyalty

 

Justice discards party, friendship, kindred, and is always therefore represented as blind.

-- Joseph Addison, from "Justice", contributed to The Guardian

Obama and Romney Defend Progressive Taxation, But It's an Attack on Property and Justice

So says John Chapman, here:

To prove the moral case for progressivity — that, in President Obama’s exact words, the rich should pay “their fair share”, it would have to be shown that the marginal utility of the last $100,000 of income for the millionaire was providing less satisfaction than the last $1,000 for the worker making $10,000 in income.

To say this colloquially, Messrs. Obama and Romney feel that the millionaire should feel as much pain from losing his last 10% of income — should bear as much burden from this loss — as does the worker who loses his last 10%.  President Obama and evidently Governor Romney both posit that this is not the case with flat-rate taxation; they believe that the loss of the last 10% is not equiproportional for both without progressive rates.  But there is of course no way to know that empirically, and indeed, there are sound reasons to think the opposite is true — that progressive taxation is “unfair” to the higher-income earners by taking an “unjust” amount of their property from them, that ultimately harms the economy as a whole. ...

For steep progressivity is, at root, an attack on both property and blindness in the application of law.  Marginal rates of taxation now approach 60% in states like New York, and “the rich”, rather than acquiesce to Mr. Obama’s concept of paying their “fair share”, are simply vacating the state and/or ceasing in the taxable production of goods and services: chronic deficits leading to fiscal collapse then appear on the horizon in such cases.  Greece is a current exemplar of the extreme end to which this situation leads, and no amount of moralizing about “fairness” is relevant on the streets of Athens today.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu Praises Chevy Volt, Owns No Car, Wife Drives Beemer!

Her car uses premium gas, as reported here.

Greeks Violate Contract Law Just Like ObamaCare Does in America

Obama and the Democrats have violated hundreds of years of contract law in passing ObamaCare because the law forces Americans to enter into health insurance contracts on penalty of fine or even imprisonment. For contracts to be valid in a court of law, however, contracts must be entered into willingly, not under compulsion.

Now we learn here that the Greek Parliament, having thrown out people who won't vote the correct way, has interfered with bond contracts, rewriting the terms after the fact in order to get what it wants:

The Greek parliament's retroactive law last month to insert collective action clauses (CACs) into its bonds to coerce creditor hold-outs has added a fresh twist. These CAC's are likely to be activated over coming days. Use of retroactive laws to change contracts is anathema in credit markets.

Add to this the US housing MERS scandal which has violated the ancient principle of traceable registered property documentation and I'd say we have a trinity of cases demonstrating a complete and utter repudiation of The West by The West.

What A Shock: The New Republic Defends Crony Capitalism

Michael Kazin for The New Republic here argues that crony capitalism isn't really that big a deal because it is pretty much as old as the old Republic itself, except he skips the founders and begins in the nineteenth century.

It doesn't occur to him that perhaps crony capitalism suggested itself to so many Americans because they drank from the well of monarchy for so long. No thoughtful person who respects the founders imagines they were inoculated from the failings attendant upon all natures mixed with good and evil. The left delights in pointing this out, whereas the true right mentions it as a cautionary tale.

We are monarchy's lesser children because of people like John Locke, who was at pains to remind us that "is" does not always mean "ought", else we should, for example, beget and raise children to sell them into slavery because it was done, sometime, somewhere, in the past. Reason is necessary. Respecting ancient practice is not the essential meaning of conservatism, try as the left does to reduce it always to such a formulation. They are the terrible simplifiers still.

The greater children of monarchy are the strong men of Europe who drank deeply from the well of Marx after centuries of experience with kings and queens. Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini were thus hyperbolic, aberrant, monarchists, and insofar as leftists like Wilson and FDR reinfected America with their example was to no good purpose, no matter how much The New Republicans say so to the contrary.