Read it.

After a brilliant century and a terrible decade, the United States, in this important election year, has reached a point in its history when the obvious can no longer be denied: The reality of life in America so greatly contradicts the claim — albeit one that has always been exaggerated — to be the “greatest nation on earth,” that even the most ardent patriots must be overcome with doubt.

Even the Germans are noticing.

Read it.

As Stalin said, it doesn’t matter who votes, what matters is who counts the votes.

Read it. And watch the video.

As the Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney observed yesterday on Twitter, President Barack Obama has secured the endorsement of a well-known crony capitalist: the rap star Jay Z. As a part-owner of the New Jersey Nets basketball team, Jay Z profited at taxpayer expense when the state of New York abused its eminent domain powers to seize privately-owned homes and business and then handed that land over to fellow Nets owner and real estate tycoon Bruce Ratner, who built a new arena for the Nets to call home.

A few months before the state-sanctioned bulldozers came through, Reason.tv visited Freddy’s Bar, one of the many local establishments that was demolished for the economic benefit of folks like Jay Z and Ratner.

Read it.

These Inspectors are election officials – again, court appointed — and are reportedly being thrown out by the Head Judges of Elections (these Judges are elected Democrats) .

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

Who beat Microsoft and Google billionaires this year as the top contributors to Barack Obama’s re-election campaign? None other than professors up and down the state of California.

Employees and faculty affiliated with the University of California system came in as the top Obama donor in the 2012 election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Pigs will vote for a bigger trough ever time. Depend on it.

Read it.

Because Muslims are like Communists in that whatever came before them is of no interest and no value.

We saw this in the dynamiting of the ancient Buddha statues by the Taliban, and the bulldozing of Sufi shrines in Africa by Salafists.

Yet another reminder that Islam is an oppressive totalitarian ideology with which no co-existence is possible.

Read it.

Today’s fashion is to throw away the textbook and to teach kids to think like mathematicians. The problem? They’re not learning how to do actual math.

No shit. The problem with the theories being taught in Ed schools these days is that they’re trying to teach teenagers skills that are appropriate to college and graduate students. As a result, kids graduate from High School not knowing basic facts and skills.

Read it.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

That ol’ debbil Unintended Consequences raises it’s ugly head — just as minimum wage laws cause unemployment, mandated benefit laws tend to shrink the pool of the fully-employed to the bare minimum of those who are absolutely essential to a particular firm’s operations. Good news for them, bad news for everybody else who might want, you know, a job.

Much like unions, come to think of it.

Read it.

As anyone who rides Amtrak between New York and Washington knows, the trip can be a dissonant experience. Inside the train, it’s all tidy and digital, everybody absorbed in laptops and iPhones, while outside the windows an entirely different world glides by. Traveling south is like moving through a curated exhibit of urban and industrial decay. There’s Newark and Trenton and the heroic wreckage in parts of Philadelphia, block after block of hulking edifices covered in graffiti, the boarded-up ghost neighborhoods of Baltimore made familiar by “The Wire” — all on the line that connects America’s financial center and its booming capital city.

Life on the Other Left Coast. You voted for it — you own it. (Hey, you could always move to Detroit….)

Simon Kuper, Brit, writing in the Financial Times (think: the Wall Street Journal run by the staff of The Nation) is seriously disappointed that the U.S. hasn’t gone down the same lefty road that Europe has.

When I went to study in the US in 1993, I did what we members of the “transatlantic generation” were supposed to do: I fell in love with America. I liked how you could talk to someone at a bus stop without their thinking you were a serial killer. I liked living in a rich, optimistic country. I liked brunch. Yet the US also seemed reassuringly familiar. I felt I’d known it for ever, and not just thanks to Archie comics. In politics, both candidates in the 1992 election, Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush, could have slotted seamlessly into the European political scene. Indeed, in Britain the right instinctively backed Bush and the left Clinton.

Yeah, many of us felt the same way. (That is not a compliment.)

After I left the US, it took me a year to get over it. But now, viewing the elections from Europe, the US feels like an alien land. “The Atlantic seems to have got a bit wider,” says Daniel Keohane, head of strategic affairs at the European think-tank Fride. It’s become hard to say “our shared western values” without smirking.

That’s because we kept them and you abandoned them. It takes two to share.

Simon: It’s not us; it’s you.

Gates of Vienna, who have more time than I do to track down what’s happening, have some interesting speculations. I shall be posting links to the relevant articles as they become available.

Read it.

“Unisex Bathrooms for Diversity” sounds like the title of an article at The Onion but this is real. Anyone would sympathize with someone who needs a bathroom but can’t find one. That’s not what’s happening here though.

UT Arlington is one of those bright blue pustules that deface the map of Texas wherever there is a publicly funded institution of higher education. In that, Texas cannot escape the degeneration that has afflicted the educational field in the rest of the country.

Read it.

A potentially steep hike in the capital gains tax rate is prompting some business owners to sell their companies before the end of the year.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Gates of Vienna, who have more time than I do to track down what’s happening, have some interesting speculations. I shall be posting links to the relevant articles as they become available.

The recent Middle East crisis (and the domestic political blowback in the USA) is a case in point. There are so many aspects of it that don’t make any obvious sense. Just to list a few:

How to explain the sudden appearance of “spontaneous” demonstrations protesting the Mohammed movie in Cairo, followed almost immediately by similar eruptions in other parts of the Muslim world?
The demo in Cairo began as a demand that the Blind Sheikh be released, and then morphed into an attack on the American embassy within the space of a couple of hours ostensibly over the movie. What’s going on here?
The “demonstration” in Libya never actually happened — there was only a well-planned Salafist terrorist attack on the consulate, which was in part made possible by collaborators within the local gunsels employed to protect an almost undefended consulate. What’s going on here?
Why were there such confused, incoherent, and contradictory responses and explanations by the American government, from the highest levels of the Obama administration?
Why was the movie, Innocence of Muslims, unnoticed and unremarked before the day of the incidents in Egypt and Libya?
Why would a habitual criminal and fraudster decide to expose himself to death fatwas by making a cheesy movie?
Why was there an initial attempt to pin the making of the movie on an Israeli-American Jew?
Many commentators in the Counterjihad believe that President Obama has been doing the bidding of the Muslim Brotherhood and is in collusion with them. Why, then, did the current crisis seem to catch the administration completely off guard?

Those are just a few of the questions that could be asked about puzzling aspects of the Long Hot Arab Summer. But one more needs to be appended, on a seemingly unrelated topic:

With the exception of Fox News, all major American news media have given fawning coverage to Barack Hussein Obama. For more than four years they have been his obsequious cheerleaders. What, then, explains the recent incidents — during the home stretch of Mr. Obama’s campaign for re-election — of disrespect, negativity, and outright opposition shown by the MSM to the erstwhile Messiah?

It’s time for us to open the closet door and see what may be crouching there amongst all the pinafores and the frocks.

Read it.

Perhaps he was anticipating an Obama victory and his receipt of a job with the TSA.

As Phyllis Schlafly so famously said, No wonder liberal women think men are pigs — their men are pigs.

Read it.

Historically, from John Lindsay to Nelson Rockefeller, New York Republicans have always been more interested in having the guy in office be called a Republican than actually be a Republican. This is what happens when they do that.

Of course, this sort of cunning is how Bloomberg got to be a billionaire in the first place: If he endorses Obama and Obama wins, then he has juice in Washington when he goes there asking for money for NYC. If he endorses Obama and Obama loses, it doesn’t matter, because no nominally Republican President will dare blow off a nominally Republican mayor of a major city when he goes there asking for money.

President John McCain would, of course, had told him to go lick his own testicles. Somehow I can’t see President Romney doing that — or President Bush, for that matter, considering how he supported Arlen Specter against Twomey last time a real Republican and a fake Republican faced off in a national election.

Watch it.

Read it.

 Millions of pounds given as aid to fund development work in Uganda has reportedly been siphoned off into the private bank accounts of aides to the country’s prime minister.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Gee, sounds like Detroit. Or maybe Chicago. Wonder what the connection might be.

Read it.

But only in New York City, so it’s doubtful that anyone will notice. Most of them vote Democrat anyway.

Robert Kling, a Real Economist, is not optimistic.

The loss of key transportation infrastructure raises the cost of imports (food, construction materials, etc.), even as exports (financial services) go down. This drives down equilibrium real wages in many secondary industries (food service, for example), but the adjustment process is not at all smooth. Many small businesses fail and many jobs are lost.

In order to remain ongoing concerns, many financial services firms will “temporarily” relocate to suburban offices and to virtual offices. These “temporary” adaptations will become so well entrenched that many of these businesses will not return to Manhattan.

Read it.

Ms. Adler owns Selective Search Inc., a high-end matchmaking service in Chicago. With 28 offices across the nation, the firm pledges to find the ideal mate for clients paying fees that start at $20,000. Not in four presidential elections has Selective Search seen so much love lost over politics.

In this neck-and-neck, ideologically fraught presidential election season, politically active singles won’t cross party lines. The result is a dating desert populated by reds and blues who refuse to make purple.

Pretty stupid. I was married to a Democrat for thirteen years — still would be, if she hadn’t died — with never an unkind word. I can see not wanting to date stupid people, which would eliminate about 90% of those on the Left, but there’s enough windage in that to make having an explicit criterion silly.

Read it.

Guess the system works. Sort of.

Read it.

An Australian pilot and crew were held hostage at Shanghai airport for more than six hours by a mob of angry passengers after their flight was diverted due to bad weather.

Fly the friendly skies….

Read it.

Drug bosses in Rio de Janeiro have issued a ‘death order’ against a sniffer dog named Boss, according to reports.

It’s a dogs life.

Read it.

In Newton County, Georgia, 8-year-old Andrew Berry found he’d accidentally brought an unloaded BB gun to school in his backpack. So he immediately told his third-grade teacher. Bad move. The teacher told the principal, who suspended Berry for 10 days and filed a police report.

Well, at least that teaches the kid to keep his mouth shut and not talk to grownups.

How educational is that?

Read it.

Just in case you were feeling cheerful about something.

Ross Douthat examines the creepy Obama regime.

 To today’s Obama supporters, these forays — like the campaign’s broader “war on women” framing, and its recent attempts to make the election a referendum on abortion in cases of rape — just emphasize that the president is on the side of female empowerment, sexual, professional and otherwise.

But given the way Obama’s once-enormous edge among female voters has shrunk in many polls, tomorrow’s feminists may look back on his campaign’s pitch to women and see a different theme emerge: a weirdly paternalistic form of social liberalism, in which women are forever single girls and the president is their father, lover, fiancé and paladin all rolled into one. (Our future dissertation author may note with bemusement, for instance, that Dunham’s ad mirrors a similar advertisement cut for … Vladimir Putin.)

Read it.

Moscow police have discovered a brothel on the premises of a monastery whose abbot is thought to be President Vladimir Putin’s spiritual adviser.

That sounds exactly like the sort of ‘spiritual adviser’ that a former KGB apparatchik would have.

Read it.

I have one suggestion for the Obama campaign and supporters thereof:

Moratorium on the creepy campaign ads with choirs of children singing about how much of a savior President Obama is.

Maybe it’s a Halloween thing, I don’t know.

Read it.

Chicago experienced more waves of violence on Saturday night and Sunday morning as one person was killed and six more were wounded by gunfire in the city with perhaps the nation’s most draconian gun-control laws.

Funny how the places with the strictest ‘gun control’ laws always seem to have the worst record on gun violence. One might almost think that there was a connection between the two.

Read it.

Attendees at a Racine, Wisc., Tea Party rally Saturday were met with a parking lots full of nails deliberately placed there early in the morning before the event, which I attended.

This incident adds to a week where a gay Republican campaign worker was brutally beaten and, in a separate incident, a son of a local state senator was hospitalized after defending his Romney sign after two people attempted to remove it from his yard.

I’m sure George W Bush was behind it all.

Watch the Young Pioneers of the Democrat Party sing for the Dear Leader.

Read it.

 Since the 1980s, in part because of “political correctness” concerns about racially insensitive speech and sexual harassment, and in part because of the dramatic expansion in the ranks of nonfaculty campus administrators, colleges have enacted stringent speech codes. These codes are sometimes well intended but, outside of the ivory tower, would violate the constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech. From protests and rallies to displays of posters and flags, students have been severely constrained in their ability to demonstrate their beliefs. The speech codes are at times intended to enforce civility, but they often backfire, suppressing free expression instead of allowing for open debate of controversial issues.

The Other McCain raises a disturbing issue.

The flapping sound is chickens coming home to roost. And, funny thing about that, they’re all wearing ‘Vote Democrat’ buttons.

Read it. (That’s for a fashionably sufficient expansive definition of ‘British’, of course.)

Tony Blair’s party was working from the same playbook as Ted Kennedy’s party: Immigrants need social services (i.e. handouts) and the Left are the party of handouts, so let ’em all in and they’ll vote for us forever. It worked for the 19th century, it worked for the 20th century, and it’ll probably work for the 21st century as well.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. If Obama gets re-elected, it’s a sure thing.

Hey, it’s Bill Gates, so it’s gotta be true….

Read it.

A new Center for Responsive Politics analysis out this week shows that despite President Obama slipping in the polls, he still has the love of many employees of the biggest players in Washington, D.C.: Google, Microsoft, Lawyers and Lobbying Firms.

Google, which has maintained a long, close relationship with the President and his team is, together with Microsoft, one of the top three employers of donors to his re-election campaign.

Unfortunately, there’s a major difference between smart and wise.

Another notable source of donations to Obama: Lawyers and employees of lobbying firms.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Despite Obama’s ban on taking donations from registered federal lobbyists, he still raked in $59,252 last month from those employed by lobbying firms and state-level lobbyists– setting a new record for monthly donations from the lobbying sector to the President’s re-election campaign.

Yet another Obama promise broken. No news here.

Read it.

Funny thing how ‘populists’ always have schemes that involve the government oppressing people, as if that sort of thing will never, ever come back to bite them in the butt.

What’s a mother to do?

My daughter has repeatedly brought home books from the school library that I have a problem with. I’m a feminist and I’m anti-censorship. I’m lost.

I can well believe that.

 Yesterday, for the THIRD time, LittleTaff brought home a fairy tale… this time Rapunzel. Objectified women with little or no agency, basing marriage decisions on the appearance or wealth of the men, and WITCHES!!!!

I know a number of people who consider themselves ‘witches’. All of them are deep-dyed left wing. So I’m not sure what the complaint is, here. I suppose it would be worse if it had (gasp) Christians in it. Still….

 I did do some reconnaissance and go to the Feminist Bookshop in Sydney this morning…. but they’ve closed down. I really need a feminist parent reality check/pep talk.

What you really need is a brain that isn’t steeped in ‘progressive’ brain-wash. Unfortunately the supply-chain is very low on that these days.

Read it.

How about the repeated efforts by Obama to publicly humiliate Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu? And the time Obama stated that Israel should return to the suicidal pre-1967 borders? Or the elision from the 2012 Democratic platform of some key elements from the 2008 platform, namely that Israel was the strongest US ally in the Middle East, that Hamas should be isolated from being a partner in the peace process, that the bogus Palestinian right to return should be opposed.  Or the refusal to name Jerusalem the capital of Israel, and the absolute unwillingness to condemn Arab terrorism.

The view of the Transnational Crust has always been that Israel is a ‘shitty little country‘ and they wish it would just go away — and if that means a massacre of  current Israelis by Arab terrorists, well, they aren’t going to lose any sleep over it.

Read it.

The Diocese of South Carolina announced on Wednesday (Oct. 17) that it has disaffiliated from the Episcopal Church, escalating a long-running skirmish and setting the stage to become the fifth diocese to secede from the denomination.

Like watching a snowman melt in the sun.

Read it.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

The area is called the National Petroleum Reserve because in 1976 Congress designated it as a strategic oil and natural gas stockpile to meet the “energy needs of the nation.” Alaska favors exploration in nearly the entire reserve. The feds had been reviewing four potential development plans, and the state of Alaska had strongly objected to the most restrictive of the four. Sure enough, that was the plan Interior chose.

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar says his plan “will help the industry bring energy safely to market from this remote location, while also protecting wildlife and subsistence rights of Alaska Natives.” He added that the proposal will expand “safe and responsible oil and gas development, and builds on our efforts to help companies develop the infrastructure that’s needed to bring supplies online.”

The problem is almost no one in the energy industry and few in Alaska agree with him. In an August 22 letter to Mr. Salazar, the entire Alaska delegation in Congress—Senators Mark Begich and Lisa Murkowski and Representative Don Young—call it “the largest wholesale land withdrawal and blocking of access to an energy resource by the federal government in decades.” This decision, they add, “will cause serious harm to the economy and energy security of the United States, as well as to the state of Alaska.” Mr. Begich is a Democrat.

When Obama says ‘energy independence’, what he means is ‘completely blocked off from access to energy’ — not the sort of ‘independence’ that most people are looking for.

Read it.

 A £3.2 million award for “excellence in African leadership” has failed to find a winner for the third time in six years after the prize committee decided that none of the continent’s leaders fitted the criteria.

Tell the truth — where is there a continent that could pass that test?

Read it.

I’m sure there’s a lesson in there somewhere, although it’s not exactly clear what it might be. Maybe it’s just Don’t Live in Britain, which is always a good rule of thumb, although I’m sure the same thing is equally likely to happen in any major metropolitan area in the U.S.

Read it.

HealthBridge Management and CareOne, related companies that own and operate nursing homes in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and two other states, filed a lawsuit on Wednesday against the New England Health Care Employers Union, also known as Service Employees International Union (SEIU) 1199NE, and United Healthcare Workers East, also an affiliate of SEIU.

The lawsuit claims the unions violated the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act through the use of threats, sabotage, and intimidation in a “shake-down” to coerce the companies to accept union demands. The health care companies charge that SEIU’s use of the help of politicians and liberal activists to intimidate them amounted to criminal extortion.

Why is it that, whenever you see a picture of SIEU people demonstrating, they’re always all fat and ugly? Where is Julia Roberts?

Read it.

The Department for Work and Pensions set up its auto-enrolment scheme this month. The policy obliges companies to enrol all staff into work pensions and is designed to give up to 11?million employees a private pension for the first time.

Estimates from the department suggest that companies will look to save £2.6? billion of the annual cost of the pensions by capping wage rises for their staff.

History of a government program:

1. “Wouldn’t it be great if everybody had X?”
2. “Yeah, but they’re too stupid to do X on their own.”
3. “No problem! We’ll just pass a law making their employer’s  pay for it! What could go wrong?”
4. “Well, if we have to pay for X, then we can’t pay for Y. Sorry.”
5. “But that’s not what we intended!”
6. “Well, then, don’t make us pay for X.”
7. “I’ve got a better idea — we’ll pass another law making you pay for Y as well! Win-win!”
8. Repeat until employers run out of money and all the ‘beneficiaries’ lose their jobs.
9. Politicians retire to someplace sunny with generous benefits paid for by taxpayers.
10. Jobless people eat their gruel while some old reactionary tells them the one about the Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs.

They never learn that when they vote for people to give them free stuff, the free stuff has to come from somewhere.

 “The reality is that the money has to come from somewhere. You can’t just magic it.”

Read it.

 Kombucha is a home brew favorite with the seitan-and-seaweed set, thanks to the a host of (unverified) health benefits some believe confers.

You’d think that the multi-culti bureaucrats in California would be down with that. But you’d be wrong.

The California kid originally got fingered for the container his mom packed the tea in: a glass bottle protected by a foam sleeve. (Aficionados say the acidic tea shouldn’t be packed in plastic or metal.)

Yeah, God forbid that a California child should use a recyclable glass container rather than plastic that started out in some Arab oil well. But wait, there’s more.

But when school officials found out what was inside the verboten receptacle, they freaked out. The kid spent the whole day in the school office. At one point they called in a police officer. The vice principal suggested that the kid may be required to transfer schools and tried to enroll him in alcohol abuse counseling course aimed at teens. Then the infraction was reported to the school district and the kid was suspended for 5 days.

Babies, don’t let your mom pack your lunch on the Left Coast.

The kid’s mom got wind of what was going on and wound up getting the suspension revoked, but it’s on his record and the school district may yet choose to take action.

For lo, the sins of the parents descend to the children even unto the fourth generation.

Welcome to Progressive America, kid, where personal freedom is a vague memory and you get punished for who you are rather than what you do.

Read it.

It turns out, surprise, surprise, that high returns were actually linked to high levels of risk (not to mention liquidity risk).  And that the management fees at hedge funds and the like are much higher than for low-cost index funds and the like.  And the hedge fund managers collect 20% of the up-side return and a percentage of the assets under management (they don’t reimburse for downside returns though, of course).

Sort of makes you wonder why, if these funds are so risky and expensive while returning below-market returns, universities persist in investing so much money in them.

Sort of makes you wonder why people are willing to entrust such people with the education of their children.

Read it.

Egypt unveiled a proposed draft of a new constitution Wednesday amid criticism from liberals and human rights groups that the document is tilted toward Islamic law and endangers the democratic ideals of the uprising that last year overthrew Hosni Mubarak.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Article 36 stipulates that “the state shall take all measures to establish the equality of women and men in the areas of political, cultural, economic, and social life, as well as all other areas, insofar as this does not conflict with the rulings of Islamic sharia.”

Hole, meet truck. Truck, meet hole. Drive, truck, drive.

Human Rights Watch criticized the provision as “not consistent with international human rights law.” In a report this week, the organization said that the proposed draft “contains many loopholes that would allow future authorities to repress and limit basic rights and freedoms.”

Okay, somebody explain to me how this is any better than it was before. At least under Mubarak we were getting value for your money.

“The draft constitution defines citizens as those whose identity is primarily Islamic, and, secondly, nationals of the country. In this conception of citizenship, the state aims to control and hegemonize citizens’ visions, stances and beliefs, working to entrench them and produce standardized citizens.”

Perhaps they could get Barack to play Big Brother there, once his gig in America is over.