Read it.

The Obama administration’s unraveling story of the deadly September 11 attack on the U.S. embassy in Libya has not finished unraveling. A State Department official yesterday confirmed that there was no mob outside the Benhazi compound prior to the Al Qaeda attack that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others. And a former security officer at the embassy told Congress that officials on the ground had spent months prior to the attack requesting more protection for the site.

The President wouldn’t lie to us, would he. Apparently he would.

The Secretary of State wouldn’t lie to us, would she? Well, she is a Clinton….

Read it.

 “The younger deaf community doesn’t use these old signs because of a clear process of political correctness.”

Control language and you control thought. We can’t have people thinking — or saying — improper things, now can we?

Read it.

A New Hampshire judge has ruled that students in New Hampshire can vote there despite being unable to prove residency in the state.

Even though the college vote for Obama has diminished, this was a victory for liberals.  In a state which is expected to be close, the student vote could make a difference.

Read it.

Soldiers were ordered not to open fire on Taliban fighters planting mines in case they disturb local people, it has been claimed.

U.S. military chiefs ordered troops to exercise ‘courageous constraint’ and even warned them they could be charged with murder if they shot any Taliban without permission from above.

No wonder we’re losing.

Read it.

Their call came following an outcry over the gang-rape and subsequent suicide of a 16 year old girl, Sharmila, in Sacchakhera village, Haryana, close to the capital New Delhi. According to relatives, she was gang-raped by neighbours, while members of a neighbour’s family watched, including a local policeman. Several of them have been arrested but the policeman has been reported missing.

Shortly after the attack, the girl poured kerosene on her body and set fire to herself. She was taken to a local hospital which declined to treat her, and died shortly after reaching another.

Because, of course, it would just be too much effort to create a society in which 16-year-old girls didn’t get raped. Who has time for that?

Read it.

 An unnamed man who was paid to slaughter civilians in Darfur will remain in the UK indefinitely because a British judge has ruled his life would be in danger if he returned to Sudan.

Of course. The fact that Britain no longer has the death penalty means that it has to impose that same decision on wherever crimes are committed, if the perpetrator has the good sense to come to Britain before he is caught.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain, a country where criminals have more rights than  victims.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here — and already is, in Democrat-run places like California, Massachusetts, Michigan, and wherever fine racial preferences are sold.

Read it.

About 200 Occupy Oakland activists held a march which turned into a roving vandalism spree through downtown. Billed as a protest against the war in Afghanistan, protesters smashed the windows of banks, businesses and BMW’s along their route. Marchers also smashed glass doors at City Hall.

Of course! Random acts of vandalism by low-rent young slackers will convince our government to get out of Afghanistan far more effectively than will our having lost 2000 highly (and expensively) trained troops with no apparent result! Why didn’t we think of that before?

Read it.

Some of the higher fees and higher unbanked numbers surely is due to the recession.  But some of the rise in the number of unbanked and underbanked consumers is directly the result of the rising bank fees, which has pushed marginal consumers out of the banking system and deterred bringing in new consumers.  And the rising bank fees are primarily the result of Dodd-Frank, the Durbin Amendment’s price controls on debit card interchange fees, and new rules on overdraft fees.  Of course, both of these phenomena were entirely predictable (and predicted).

The problem with attempts to constrain the workings of economic markets through government regulations rarely work as intended, because markets almost always find a way around them. This is because markets arise when two people want to trade, a fact that politicians and their entourages never seem to grasp intellectually. If two people want to trade, they will find a way to trade, whatever the law might say; and those who make laws need to take this into account if their laws are to work, which they never do.

It’s really depressing living in a country run by stupid people. Unfortunately, that appears to be almost all of them.

Read it.

Border Patrol Agent Nicholas Ivie was murdered near Naco, AZ while investigating a tripped sensor. He and two other agents were on horseback, because the area is federal land and no vehicles are allowed on wilderness lands.

The environment is apparently more important to our government than allowing our Border Patrol agents easy access to known smuggling lands. It also makes them open targets without an easy getaway.

Of course. Law enforcement can break down your door and trash your house and pistol-whip your kids because they got the wrong apartment on a drug bust, but God forbid they use vehicles in federal wilderness lands.

Read it.

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

Oh Noes!

Electric cars might pollute much more than petrol or diesel-powered cars, according to new research.

Imagine that.

Read it.

The Dear Leader passes through Flyover Country. You may think you’re there to study, but this is more important.

Read it.

For Obama and the left, the law is merely a suggestion for what they can do. Can’t get something through Congress? Simply issue an executive order. Can’t get an appointment through the Senate? Simply “declare” the Senate in recess and appoint away. Act now and let the judges sort it out later.

For the past few weeks, several defense contractors made it clear they would have to send out layoff notices to thousands of workers due to automatic budget cuts set to take effect in January. The cuts are triggered by the debt ceiling “deal” hatched last year. The layoff notices are required under federal law.

Understandably, the Obama Administration was panicked by this. The notices would hit in the last month of his reelection campaign and have a huge impact in the critical swing state of Virginia, home to hoards of defense contractors. What to do? Simple. Ignore the law.

Yesterday, Lockheed Martin, a massive contractor, announced it had reached a “deal” with the White House and would not send out the legally required layoff notices. The Obama Administration had “interpreted” the law and found it would be “inappropriate” to send out the layoff notices.

More amazingly, the White House promised to pay any fines or penalties that might be leveled against the company for violating federal law. Read that again.

Read it.

About 60 percent of physicians would quit today if they had the chance, according to new research.

The Physicians Foundation commissioned the national survey of 13,575 doctors.

Read it.

Darwin Award nominee.

I suppose it’s too much to ask the admission committee why they let this guy in….

Read it.

Earlier this year, Hampton, Virginia police shut down a 19-month cigarette smuggling sting operation because officers are suspected of the inappropriate use of funds and personal property. The operation yielded no arrests or criminal charges.

Launched in June 2010, the operation was originally a joint investigation with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), but Hampton officers discovered an ATF agent (who had originally approached them about setting up the sting) was selling cigarettes on the side. The ATF withdrew from the case, and in September 2011 its agent was sentenced to over three years in jail.

Q: Why did you get a job with the government?

A: Because that’s where the money is.

Read it.

One wonders what would have happened had Barack Obama not promised not to raise taxes on the middle class. Perhaps none of us would have any money left. (Except him and his rich friends, of course.)

Read it.

As news breaks that 57 more Fast and Furious weapons have been found in Mexico, it is also being confirmed that some of those weapons were used to slaughter 14 Mexican teenagers and wound 12 more near Ciudad Juarez.

According to reports, a group of armed commandos parked outside a birthday party attended by high school and college students on January 30, 2010, and opened fire with some of the weapons which had been smuggled across the border during the Fast and Furious operation.

Nobody has gone to jail. Nobody has been fired. Just your tax dollars at work.

Read it.

There are times when the standard comments about dysfunctional black culture are pretty inadequate.

On the other hand, if we had fights and gunshots breaking out at the Oscars, think what it would do for the ratings. I’d watch.

Read it.

California isn’t just a basket case, it’s a proselytizing basket case, with its environmental zealots, community organizers, and wishful economic thinkers aggressively selling their ideas to other states and to the federal government. As Laer demonstrates, while the recession is slowing the other forty-nine states from buying into California’s governing philosophy, the Obama government is an enthusiastic supporter. Another four years of Obama, and California won’t be the only bankrupt crazy place in America.

…

Because California had long been blessed with enormous natural resources and a vital, growing population, it had the wealth to keep the impractical Progressive dream going for decades. It could abs0rb the enormous financial and human losses from almost heroic bureaucratic ineptitude (Chapter 5); laws and regulations that suck the life out of both new and established businesses (Chapter 6); ridiculous educational experiments and an all-powerful teachers union that has little interest in student well-being and education (Chapter 7);* environmentalism run amok (Chapter 8); and public sector unions and pensions that have managed to go wherever one ends up when “amok” is a distant memory (Chapter 9).

Read it.

Don’t you feel more secure? I sure feel more secure.

The TSA: Bringing Third-World corruption to a First-World neighborhood near you.

Yet another reason not to fly.

Read it.

Mark Bittman, who for years wrote “The Minimalist,” a useful and entertaining recipe column in the food section of The New York Times, is now an op-ed columnist for the paper. That’s too bad, because he was much better at the former job. In an essay that ran in the Sunday edition of the Times, Bittman gets excited about the “fun” and “inspiring” project of taxing Americans into better eating habits. Like Kelly Brownell, who runs the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University, Bittman wants to “tax things like soda, French fries, doughnuts and hyperprocessed snacks” while subsidizing “the purchase of staple foods like seasonal greens, vegetables, whole grains, dried legumes and fruit.”

Too many people in this world think that it’s the primary function of government to make other people do it their way. That’s what we’re fighting.

Steve Sailer explains it all to you.

 As you can see from the map, you can now go anywhere … except for the huge chunk of the left side of the map that represents the Westside, which is where most of the money and good jobs are. In theory, Westside liberals are all in favor of rail transit, except in practice they don’t seem to either use it or want others using it near them.

Back in 1986, the feds were offering to help build a subway down Wilshire Blvd., but Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Beverly Hills) blocked it, so the Purple Line peters out in Koreatown.

Mass transit is fine for the Little People, but we can’t have them riding though our neighborhoods.

 The question with mass transit in Los Angeles is one of class transit. The poor have always ridden mass transit, and the poor we shall always have with us. But higher classes have always taken their cues from the top. In Los Angeles, the top people have always attempted to live as inaccessibly as possible. Last May, for instance, I looked up as President Obama’s Marine Corps One helicopter droned overhead on one stage of his labyrinthine passage to a fundraiser at George Clooney’s house in Fryman Canyon. Even if you are President, you can’t get to Clooney’s house easily.

That’s why God made SUVs, obviously.

 If your fondest career hope is that Steven Spielberg’s personal assistant calls you up and invites you over to Steve’s house in Pacific Palisades to talk about that idea you have, you’d better have a car because you can’t get to his house any other way. And it better be a nice car to park in his curving driveway because you don’t want to look like some kind of a loser. And similar thinking goes for all the people hoping to get invited to the house of somebody who is hoping to get invited to Spielberg’s house, and on down the line.

Hey, one must have standards.

Read it.

Pretty soon the only ones left will be the stupid ones.

With results as you see them….

Read it.

President Barack Obama campaigned in 2008 on a promise to make his administration the most transparent administration ever, but a recent Bloomberg News survey found that 19 out of 20 cabinet-level agencies failed to obey the law to disclose the cost of travel by its top officials. In addition, just eight of the 57 federal agencies met the news organization’s request within the 20-day time period required by law.

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

Read it.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan has jumped into the food fight over school breakfast, calling for schools nationwide to adopt new programs to provide free morning meals, which Mayor Bloomberg’s administration warns might lead city kids to pack on the pounds.

Hm, which approach to Big Brother shall we take today? Increase dependence on the nanny state by providing ‘free’ food for their kids? Or increase subjection to the nanny state by dictating the composition of what food those kids will eat? What to do, what to do….

Of course, once we’ve got them hooked, if the proles refuse to get with the program, we can just cut their kids’ rations.

Read it.

It is axiomatic that if the federal government had realized five or six years ago that the technological advances in directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing that have set off the current domestic oil and natural gas boom were coming, they surely would have done something to stop it.  Now the greens and federal regulators are trying to play catch up: they can’t openly try to stop the boon of new domestic energy because its benefits (like cheap natural gas and 1 percent unemployment in North Dakota) are too evident, so they are trying to slow it up with “concern” about “issues.”

God forbid we should actually have, you know, energy independence.

Read it.

President Barack Obama has signed into law twenty-one new or higher taxes on the American people.

Read it.

An interesting way of putting it — well, it is Slate, a Voice of the Crust — but at least they recognize the problem.

So what explains the lingering suspicions that some people (even those who aren’t Monsanto-hating, organic-food-only eaters) still harbor? Some of these folks are worried about new genes being introduced into plant and animal species. But humans have been selectively breeding plants and animals pretty much since we moved out of caves, manipulating their genes all the while. The process was just slower before biotechnology came along.

Obviously, the way it was done prior to 1900 was Good, and the modern efficient scientific way is Bad. (Honestly, how these people can call themselves ‘progressives’ with a straight face is beyond me….)

Many environmentalists are concerned that genetically modified animals such as “Franken-salmon” could get loose in the wild and out-compete their nonengineered cousins, or lead to breeding problems for the wild members of the species. But even the scientist on whose research the “Trojan gene” hypothesis is based says the risk to wild salmon is “low” and that his work has been misrepresented by GMO opponents.

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

The bottom line for people worried about GMO ingredients in their food is that there is no credible scientific evidence that GMOs pose a health risk.

It never stopped them before, and it won’t stop them now….

Read  it.

Barrie Heyman and his duck Star have already raised about £6,500 for a children’s hospice by visiting businesses in Devon, England, and asking for donations. But members of the North Devon District Council are trying to put a stop to that. They say Heyman must apply 28 days in advance for a street collection permit. That permit is good for one day only.

The only thing that saves us is that we don’t get all the government we pay for.

Read it.

In Silent Spring, Carson crafted a passionate denunciation of modern technology that drives environmentalist ideology today. At its heart is this belief: Nature is beneficent, stable, and even a source of moral good; humanity is arrogant, heedless, and often the source of moral evil. Rachel Carson, more than any other person, is responsible for the politicized science that afflicts our public policy debates today.

Rachel Carson and her disciples are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of malaria victims in developing nations. This is what happens when ‘progressives’ try to solve First World ‘problems’ with ham-handed prescriptions that wind up costing lives.

Read it.

Bankers can be forgiven if they can’t figure out this regulatory whipsaw. They get punished if they make loans that are too risky, but they also get fined if they don’t make risky loans to enough minority borrowers based solely on some Washington quota.

In these degenerate modern times, the highly-politicized Justice Department will jump on you, not just for possibly breaking the law, but for insufficient zeal in the service of the Administration’s political agenda.

I rather suspect that Thomas Jefferson would not be comfortable with that.

It’s a trend.

Thanks to the United States Department of Agriculture and First Lady Michelle Obama and their insistence on changing the diet served at public schools, students across the country are giving up eating the food served at school and starving.

And now black markets are emerging; some kids in New Bedford, Massachusetts are smuggling in bottles of chocolate syrup and selling it by the squeeze because other students have resigned themselves to simply drinking milk for lunch. Nancy Carvalho, director of food services for New Bedford Public Schools, allowed that hummus and black bean salads don’t exactly draw long lines of students. These items have been tough sells in elementary cafeterias.

This is what happens when incompetent amateurs wind up in charge of important areas of life.

Read it.

But I’m sure that somehow it’s all George W Bush’s fault.

Read it.

2012’s high school seniors have the worst SAT reading score since 1972; they scored 486 on reading, out of a possible 800. In writing, students also dropped dramatically, down to 488. That’s a nine-point drop since 2006.

But I’m sure it’s somehow George W Bush’s fault.

Ross Douthat points out that Washington is turning into Imperial Rome.

Last week, new census data revealed that 7 of the 10 richest American counties in 2011 were in the Washington, D.C., region. Fairfax, Loudoun and Arlington Counties, all in Northern Virginia, have higher median incomes than every other county in the United States.

Whence comes this wealth? Mostly from Washington’s one major industry: the federal government. Not from direct federal employment, which has risen only modestly of late, but from the growing armies of lobbyists and lawyers, contractors and consultants, who make their living advising and influencing and facilitating the public sector’s work.

…

If you don’t mind congested roads and insanely competitive child rearing, all this growth is good news for those of us inside the Beltway bubble. But is it good for America? After all, like the ruthless Capital in “The Hunger Games,” the wealth of Washington is ultimately extracted from taxpayers more than it is earned. And over the last five years especially, D.C.’s gains have coincided with the country’s losses.

Read it.

My, doesn’t that look Presidential? Doncha just wanna have four more years of this amateur?

The Popinator Voice-Activated Popcorn Launcher

Read it.

You want to vote but you’re not a United States Citizen? Easy. Move to Michigan.

You want to clean up the voter rolls so only eligible citizens can vote? Don’t run for Secretary of State in Michigan, because voting rights advocates, labor unions, and Democrats will sue you.

Corruption, thy name is Democrat.

Read it.

President Barack Obama attended a fundraiser at Jay-Z’s 40/40 Club in Manhattan that featured a champagne tower of 350 bottles worth $105,000 – more than twice the median household income of an American family.

The tower of $300-a-bottle Armand de Brignac Brut Gold, known as ‘Ace of Spades’ because of its label, is a permanent fixture at the club.

‘It’s floor-to-ceiling gold bottles in the entire space,’ a 40/40 representative told the New York Post. ‘It’s beautiful—breathtaking. It’s the first thing you see when you walk in.’

Damned Republicans! Rubbing the faces of the poor into the dirt!

Oh, wait….

Read it.

Now, in the District and many states, goals over the next five years tend to be lower for black, Hispanic and poor children than they are for white and Asian students, and in the District, they tend to be higher at schools in affluent areas than in poor neighborhoods. It’s a policy shift that strikes some parents as a form of prejudice.

A FORM of prejudice? That it doesn’t strike ALL parents as rank, blatant racist and classist stereotyping is the most disturbing part.

Officials say the new targets account for differences in current performance and demand the fastest progress from students who are furthest behind. The goals vary across much of the country by race, family income and disability, and in Washington, they also vary by school.

Yeah, those who have demonstrated that they can really pick up the educational ball and outrun everyone else with it. And what happens when this silly notion fails, as it inevitably will? Use cattle prods on the kids until they get smarter?

The District of Columbia is where ‘progressive’ statists test out Really Stupid Ideas before mandating it for the rest of the country.

Read it.

No doubt because of that offensive film insulting Mohammed. Will the Islamophobia never cease?

Read it. And watch the videos.

Mark Steyn made two TV appearances recently to talk about the 9-11 murders in Libya, the groveling response of the United States, and the shameful behavior of President Obama during the crisis.

Read it.

An investigation by the Government Accountability Institute found that more than half of the most politically active 50 campaign bundlers for President Obama were either appointed to a presidential council, committee, board, or other White House post. Many bundlers’ businesses or relatives’ businesses also received millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded federal contracts, grants, loans, or other crony perks.

In all, the top 50 bundlers received three council appointments, one ambassadorship, two committee appointments, and a whopping 20 State Dinner invitations. Two bundlers were also placed on a presidential board, and another two were picked for other White House posts.

Hey, one hand washes the other. They aren’t in this for their health, you know.

Read it.

“There have been repeated threats to me of bodily harm,’’ Deputy Senate Majority Leader Thomas Libous (R-Binghamton) angrily told The Post.

“There have been calls saying, ‘We know where you live,’ ‘We’ll come to your house’ — that kind of stuff,’’ Libous continued.

Libous said he had notified law enforcement of the threats.

Libous also alleged that environmental activists have been making personal and political threats against local officials throughout the Southern Tier region along the Pennsylvania border, where huge deposits of natural gas are located.

And yet, if you asked them, these enviro-nazis would characterize themselves as ‘progressives’. What’s up with that?

Read it.

In a rightly-ordered society, those would be cut first.

But no. The Crust takes care of its own.

Read it.

Think of this the next time you see Britain’s National Health Service celebrated in an Olympic opening ceremony: A British hospital placed a “do not resuscitate” order on a patient, listing the reasons as “Down’s syndrome” and “learning difficulties,” BBC reports.

Don’t you just love that government-provided health care? Don’t you just wish we had a system like that here in America?

(Well, we do — Canada has such a system, which is why anybody who has anything seriously wrong with him comes to the U.S. to get it fixed.)

Read it.

The killings of the US ambassador to Libya and three of his staff were likely to have been the result of a serious and continuing security breach, The Independent can reveal.

According to senior diplomatic sources, the US State Department had credible information 48 hours before mobs charged the consulate in Benghazi, and the embassy in Cairo, that American missions may be targeted, but no warnings were given for diplomats to go on high alert and “lockdown”, under which movement is severely restricted.

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

After all, ‘nothing’ is what the Obama administration does best.

Steve Sailer blows the whistle.

 Since 1968, the government has increasingly crusaded for more mortgage lending to minorities and lower income borrowers by attacking lenders that don’t lend enough to favored groups. The last push, the White House Conference on Increasing Minority Homeownership on 10/15/2002 where Bush lauded what turned out to be toxic mortgages as engines of racial justice, gave optimistic and/or get-rich-quick lenders an excuse to set off the Housing Bubble of 2004-2007.

You might think that by now everybody would have wised up about how an originally well-intentioned policy had gone too far. But, then, we’re not supposed to mention this fact. Moreover, the institutions that brought it about still exist, still get funded, and continue to search out and destroy all evidence of disparate impact in mortgage lending like robot juggernauts from the future in a James Cameron movie.

Read it.

Two words: Corrupt politicians. Culprit? St. Jack Kennedy.