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Staff members arbitrarily change the language of a passed amendment to the bill, and there is apparently nothing anyone can do about it.

I was shocked. I asked King if there was anything he could do about this dishonest behavior on the part of Conyers’s staffers. He said that there wasn’t.

Is it any wonder that the Republican Party is dying?

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“The immigrant population fundamentally changes the pool of potential partners for Asians and Hispanics. It expands the number and reinforces the culture, which means the second generation . . . is more likely to marry people of their own ethnicity,” said Daniel T. Lichter, a sociologist at Cornell University.

Not good news.

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Boy, those Zimbabweans are sure lucky they’re no longer under the boot of that oppressive white regime.

Thank God for the U.N. and the international community, or who knows what sort of hell they’d be living in now.

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What was incipient fascism under Bushitler is just prudent government under Obama.

In a federal lawsuit, the Obama legal team is arguing that judges lack the authority to enforce their own rulings in classified matters of national security. The standoff concerns the Oregon chapter of the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, a Saudi Arabian charity that was shut down in 2004 on evidence that it was financing al Qaeda. Al-Haramain sued the Bush Administration in 2005, claiming it had been illegally wiretapped.

We live in a world where “Democrat” and “hypocrite” are interchangeable.

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Government help without the help.

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Just when you think that America is in the toilet, you are reminded that it’s a lot worse Out There.

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I think they should be allowed to hunt him down and kill him. It’s only fair.

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As horrified passengers fled the bus, Li severed McLean’s head and displayed it to some of the passengers outside, witnesses said.

A police report said an officer at the scene saw the attacker hacking off pieces of the body and eating them.

This is why I quit riding the bus.

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Yeah, but it won’t get built, because Obama scrapped the only existing plan to handle spent nuclear fuel. Thanks, Barry.

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Guess that’s what happens when you live next to a failed state. Another parallel with the 1930s, perhaps.

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Looks like most of the unemployment is in blue states — and the blue areas of red states. Coincidence? I think not.

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Although why this is necessarily a bad thing is by no means clear.

The issue matters because American universities rely on foreign students to fill slots in graduate and postdoctoral science and engineering programs.

I guess American students aren’t applying for those positions? So why are we training foreigners? Do we get some kind of scoring points for beating other countries out for foreign students? (And can those points be redeemed for valuable prizes? Somehow I suspect that they can.)

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Doing the jobs that Americans won’t do.

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Whoever it is, I like ’em.

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Really, can you blame them?

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And that only the government can handle it?

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One of the inconvenient truths about abortion-on-demand. Cultures that value males over females can now make it happen — and, historically, cultures with an excess of young men over young women eventually turn to war.

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So apparently the plan was:

1. Take advantage of the opportunity of the crisis to spend a ton of money on stuff the Democrats have been trying to spend money on for the last 40 years but haven’t been able to get through Congress, making loud scary noises whenever it looked like the herd was calming down;
2. Hope that enough special interest groups find something to their advantage in the ton of spending that they’ll stick with the Democrats while saying to hell with the rest of the country.

It might work. Guess we’ll see.

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An inconvenient truth about treating everyone in America the same.

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Professor Stephen Hopper, director of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, in London, argues that the world is currently too reliant on just a handful of key species of edible plants for food.

He warned the combined threat of disease, climate change and lack of diversity in commercial crops has left the dozen staple species that provide the bulk of the global food supply – such as wheat, maize and barley – increasingly vulnerable.

He said farmers and consumers in Britain needed to increase the range of crops they grow and eat, to safeguard food supplies in the future.

That is, if what you eat is plants. We carnivores tend not to worry about a lack of corn or vegetables. Of course, potatoes would be a sad loss.

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A Los Angeles clinic is offering the ultimate in designer babies. Want a son with brown eyes, black hair and a dark complexion? Or a pale-skinned, blonde, green-eyed daughter?

Want a smart kid? Have a hundred and kill all but the smartest. Not a problem.

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Boy, those Zimbabweans are sure lucky they’re no longer under the boot of that oppressive white regime.

Thank God for the U.N. and the international community, or who knows what sort of hell they’d be living in now.

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That would be entertaining; I’d pay to watch it.

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Looks like a motorcycle designed by somebody who drives a Prius.

No, that’s not a compliment.

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That’s an … unusual reaction.

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Not really news, but a useful reminder.

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I know that’s certainly one of my highest priorities….

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No shit.

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Not good news.

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Even the most basic inspection of the IRS income tax statistics shows that raising taxes on the salaries, dividends and capital gains of those making more than $250,000 can’t possibly raise enough revenue to fund Mr. Obama’s new spending ambitions.

“Soak the rich” is fine until the rich dissolve — and then where will you get your money?

A tax policy that confiscated 100% of the taxable income of everyone in America earning over $500,000 in 2006 would only have given Congress an extra $1.3 trillion in revenue. That’s less than half the 2006 federal budget of $2.7 trillion and looks tiny compared to the more than $4 trillion Congress will spend in fiscal 2010. Even taking every taxable “dime” of everyone earning more than $75,000 in 2006 would have barely yielded enough to cover that $4 trillion.

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Paul Weston discusses the current state of freedom in Britain.

Hint: It’s on its way out.

“We don’t have absolute freedom of speech in the United Kingdom, because I myself have voted on laws preventing people inciting racial hatred and violence.”

Mr Vaz, an immigrant of Yemeni/Portuguese extraction, is clearly proud of the part he has played in restricting the ancient and bloodstained freedoms of Britain. No doubt Vaz is pleased the dark days of 1990 are now behind him, when he wrote to the Guardian to claim “there is no such thing as absolute freedom of speech“ as he attempted to ban the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.

This is precisely the problem with unassimilated immigrants: They tend to bring their bad habits with them. We’re all familiar with the tendency of Mexican and other Latino immigrants bringing their “take it to the streets” political practices to places like Los Angeles. Britain, being a smaller country and surrounded by Cheese-Eating Surrender-Monkeys, has it a lot worse. Without eternal vigilance, it really could happen here.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

Quite frankly, looking at the photograph, I don’t see “British researcher”; I see “hippy drifter”. No doubt somebody else saw the same thing.

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They hate you, but they’re paying you big bucks. They mock you as inarticulate, but they want you to come speak to them.

What a world.

Megan McArdle squints at American Express.

It used to be that credit-card companies lured customers with cash rewards. Now American Express Co. is paying to get rid of them. The card issuer is offering selected customers a $300 AmEx prepaid gift card if they pay off their balances and close their accounts.

And why, you might ask, do they do this seemingly unbusinesslike thing?

I am also willing to bet that we see a whole lot more of this if Congress gives bankruptcy judges the ability to cram down mortgages in Chapter 13, as they almost certainly will.  The provision is going to attract a lot more people into bankruptcy, and those people are going to shed a lot of their unsecured (read:  credit card) debt.  I’d expect that credit card lenders are already desperately trying to weed out those most likely to enter Chapter 13.

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AGs send jackpot cases to the trial attorneys, who turn around and kick some of their contingency-fee winnings back to the AGs in campaign contributions. By outsourcing the work, Attorneys General can file more cases, raising their political profile. The lawyers, meanwhile, wield the power of the state and its publicity machine to force companies to settle.

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Boy, those Zimbabweans are sure lucky they’re no longer under the boot of that oppressive white regime.

Thank God for the U.N. and the international community, or who knows what sort of hell they’d be living in now.

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I am not making this up.

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So of course they’re going to close the Guantanamo detention facility.

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

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Our Canadian neighbors are somewhat more restrictive of political speech than we are here in the USA.

Up there in the Frozen North, it’s not permitted to speak out against Islam. In fact, if you’re not a Muslim, quoting the Koran is considered hate speech.

As, indeed, it often is, depending on which sura you quote — but not in the way they mean it. But socialism is like that.

The issue of free speech in Canada has just been raised in an unusual context. An alleged terrorist named Said Namouh is on trial in Quebec, and the case against him is based entirely on his internet activities. The Crown maintains that what Mr. Namouh did — distributing jihad snuff videos, offering bomb-making instructions, and helping networks of mujahideen communicate — aided and abetted terrorism. The defendant’s lawyer doesn’t dispute these facts, but maintains that what his client did was protected by — wait for it — Canada’s hallowed traditions of free speech and freedom of religion.

Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn must surely be startled to hear such an assertion. And, coming from Canadian Muslims, this is a butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-their-mouths moment.

I guess some animals are more equal than others.

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I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

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And all the leftoid press say “Amen!” Guess it wasn’t Bush’s fault after all.

Pass the popcorn.

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Yeah, we want more of those people in this country.

Arnold Kling is tired of the government’s hand in his pocket.

I’m tired of watching Paulson, Geithner, Bernanke, and now the Obama Administration picking through my wallet and giving my money to people who I don’t want to see get it. President Reagan expressed a vision for the fall of the Soviet Union when he said, “Mr. Brezhnev Gorbachev, tear down that wall.” My vision for the fall of the technocratic dictatorship might be expressed as, “Mr. Obama, give back my wallet.”

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And basic skills. Don’t forget the totally illegitimate focus on basic skills. (Or “skillz”, as modern kids think it’s spelled.)

A generation of pupils has been left impoverished by a “fundamentally deficient” primary school system that focuses only on tests and basic skills, according to the Cambridge Primary Review.

The swine. How dare they give our children basic skills — and test them to see if they’ve learned it. Oh, the humanity….

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Darwin Award trainee.

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Quelle domage.

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This is why Europe is doomed.

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In my day they would have warmed her butt and sent her home. But that was then; this is now.