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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.

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Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

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Lots of taxpayers would like to get the deal UAW workers still get.

As would I. If I had gone to work in an auto factory right out of high school, I’d be better off financially than I am right now, with three degrees (one from Yale).

Megan McArdle considers the President’s plan.

Well, the obvious point is that it represents a massive transfer to borrowers from lenders and the rest of us.  As far as I can tell, there is no penalty for having borrowed more than you could realistically afford to repay–not so much as a speck of dirt on the credit report.  The administration’s release talks a lot about “responsible homeowners”, but very few responsible homeowners have payments that amount to 43% of their monthly income.  There are exceptions, of course, such as people who have just lost their jobs, but most of the people being helped are, nearly definitionally, people who bought more house than they could afford in the belief that prices would keep rising indefinitely and they would make big bucks.  It was leveraged investing, just like a hedge fund, and often at the same kind of leverage ratios.

But I bet they all vote Democrat.

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How useful and constructive.

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It’s sad to watch. The Golden State — which a decade ago was the booming technology capital of the world — has been done in by two decades of chronic overspending, overregulating and a hyperprogressive tax code that exaggerates the impact on state revenues of economic boom and bust. Total state expenditures have grown to $145 billion in 2008 from $104 billion in 2003 and California now has the worst credit rating in the nation — worse even than Louisiana’s. It also has the nation’s fourth highest unemployment rate of 9.3% (after Michigan, Rhode Island and South Carolina) and the second highest home foreclosure rate (after Nevada).

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Saturn goes the way of all flesh, and Pontiac is not far behind it.

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Liberals shoot the wounded….

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And peole will pay money for this.

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The affidavit was Burris’s third attempt to describe his contacts with the Blagojevich team during the months before his surprise appointment. It differed on several key points from the testimony he gave under oath to an Illinois House of Representatives impeachment committee.

Now that he’s safely in the Senate, Burris feels comfortable revealing that he’s a serial liar. Isn’t that special.

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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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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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Actually, if it’s only 10 grand, they’ll probably pay it just to get rid of her. An American would have sued for 10 million.

Considering the hundreds of thousands of people who have ridden on that ride without untoward result, Disney ought to counter sue the girl and her mother for “negligence in her design and operation”.

And claiming that a fairground ride makes Disney a “common carrier” is absurd when talking about a mechanism that delivers you right back to the point where you started. If she had been on the monorail, or even a golf cart, she’d have a case. But not a roller coaster.

And anybody who gets on a ride named “The Tower of Terror” really deserves whatever she gets.

If I were Disney, I’d have her whacked. It wouldn’t cost all that much more, and it would remove her from the gene pool. In fact, have her mother whacked too; venality probably runs in the family.

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Next step: Sue somebody. Then hire lobbyists.

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I am not making this up.

Megan McArdle is nonplussed.

New York City’s main industry lies in ruins; its finances are in peril; its housing market is falling. What does the city need?  That’s right, tougher rent controls!

In times like this, it’s easy to believe that if you laid all the economists in the world end to end, they still wouldn’t reach a conclusion.  But here’s one of the things that basically everyone, left to right, agrees on:  rent control is the surest way to destroy a city’s housing stock short of aerial bombing, and one of the major culprits behind New York’s painfully low vacancy rate.

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“All you need to do is grant visas to two million Indians, Chinese and Koreans,” said Shekhar Gupta, editor of The Indian Express newspaper. “We will buy up all the subprime homes. We will work 18 hours a day to pay for them. We will immediately improve your savings rate — no Indian bank today has more than 2 percent nonperforming loans because not paying your mortgage is considered shameful here. And we will start new companies to create our own jobs and jobs for more Americans.”

And I have no problem with that. The problem is that, in actual practice, it would be two million Muslims and Latin Americans, and that is what got us into this mess in the first place.

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This reminds me of the Monty Python sketch about “the machine that goes ping!“, where a pregnant lady in a delivery theater, when she asks “What should I do?”, is patted on the head by a doctor and told “Nothing, dear; you’re not qualified.”

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably in Massachusetts.

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Not really news, but a useful reminder.

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I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

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The general didn’t get much time. After a long, controversial career, Brig. Gen. Mauro Enrique Tello Quiñones retired from active duty last month and moved to this Caribbean playground to work for the Cancun mayor and fight the drug cartels that have penetrated much of Mexican society. He lasted a week.

Tello, 63, along with his bodyguard and a driver, were kidnapped in downtown Cancun last Monday evening, taken to a hidden location, methodically tortured, then driven out to the jungle and shot in the head. Their bodies were found Tuesday in the cab of a pickup truck on the side of a highway leading out of town. An autopsy revealed that both the general’s arms and legs had been broken.

Where is Zorro when you really need him?

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(The Financial Times is the British equivalent of the Wall Street Journal — if the Wall Street Journal were run by the staff of The Nation.)

Citing Keynes gives us special licence to talk economics without using any. To paraphrase the lawyers’ dictum, when the facts are on our side, we pound the facts; when theory is on our side, we pound theory; and when neither the facts nor theory are on our side, we pound Keynes – and to great effect.

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Health-care resources are not unlimited in any country, even rich ones like Canada and the U.S., and must be rationed either by price or time. When individuals bear no direct responsibility for paying for their care, as in Canada, that care is rationed by waiting.

In Ontario, Lindsay McCreith was suffering from headaches and seizures yet faced a four and a half month wait for an MRI scan in January of 2006. Deciding that the wait was untenable, Mr. McCreith did what a lot of Canadians do: He went south, and paid for an MRI scan across the border in Buffalo. The MRI revealed a malignant brain tumor.

Ontario’s government system still refused to provide timely treatment, offering instead a months-long wait for surgery. In the end, Mr. McCreith returned to Buffalo and paid for surgery that may have saved his life.

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THE comment from the photographer at Sears was typical. “Are these all yours?” she asked, surveying Kim Gunnip’s 12 children.

“No,” Mrs. Gunnip replied, “I picked some up at the food court.”

Note that this is in the “Fashion & Style” section of the New York Times. For readers of the Times, kids are a fashion statement.

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Steve Sailer digs up an inconvenient truth.

After I reported yesterday that Bill Gates had given $1 million in 2001 to long-time Weatherman fugitive Rick Ayers (brother of President Obama’s extremely distant acquaintance Bill Ayers) to start “small learning communities” within Berkeley High to, among other things, take students to Cuba to study “social justice,” a reader who graduated from Berkeley High in the 1970s reported that the exact same idea had already been tried way back when the Ayers brothers were making bombs instead of agitating for “small schools.”

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For the first time, the General Teaching Council for England – the profession’s regulator – wants staff in the independent sector to be subjected to the same code as those in state schools.

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All of them run by Democrats. Fancy that.

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For an alleged genius, Bill Gates can be pretty stupid at times.

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Far be it from me to make derogatory remarks about Italians, but … I mean, really.

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Must be pretty gross if even the U.N. noticed.

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This is why lobbyists exist, and make so much money: They can get the government to pass a law that means big bucks for them. (And you thought ethanol was about the environment! Foolish mortal!)

Not really news, but a useful reminder.

Read it.

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

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.

Read it.

Okay, he’s got the “Bill Clinton” level; can he make it to “Jimmy Carter”? Stay tuned.