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Possibly the premier military historian of our time.

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The Obama administration’s support for its Islamist allies means a lack of U.S. support for their enemies or, more properly,victims—the Christian and other non-Muslim minorities of the Muslim world.

Your tax dollars at work.

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“The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”

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Whenever I read a science fiction story that involves aliens, especially alien societies, I have hard time buying it unless the aliens are at least as strange as the Japanese.

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With the coming advent of ObamaCare, states that are bracing for the huge increase in Medicaid recipients are looking for a way to save money and they think they’ve found one; limiting the number of prescription drugs that Medicaid patients can obtain. The cost for Medicaid will skyrocket under Obamacare because of the expanded eligibility requirements.

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We’ re from the government, and we’re here to help … ourselves to your money.

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Psychopathy is a psychological condition based on well-established diagnostic criteria, which include lack of remorse and empathy, a sense of grandiosity, superficial charm, conning and manipulative behavior, and refusal to take responsibility for one’s actions, among others.

Hey! They’re insulting the President! They must be raaaaacists!

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General Francisco Franco is to be stripped of his title of honorary mayor of Valencia, 36 years after his death, following a Spanish court ruling that it is “incompatible” with modern democracy.

Although they were quick enough to kiss his ass when he was alive. And he was a short shit, too, so that would have involved some serious bending down.

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The 2012 House farm bill has been advertised as a $35 billion spending cut. But what is not advertised is that the 2012 bill will end up costing taxpayers 59 percent more than the 2008 farm bill. So how can this be a cut? It isn’t.

The farm bill was projected to cost nearly $1 trillion. So when the House farm bill — which spends slightly less than the Senate-passed bill — was scored by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to cost $35 billion less than expected, it was cheered as a spending cut. In reality, however, the 2012 House farm bill spends nearly 60% more than our current inefficient farm and food programs. The 2008 farm bill that is currently in law was projected to cost $604 billion, while the 2012 House bill came in at $959 billion. This is not a spending cut.

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He reportedly told her he would throw away the ticket but then later phoned a lottery hotline to say it was he who had bought the lucky jackpot ticket from the store.

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Last week campaigner Luke Steele was sentenced to 18 months in jail for harassing staff at Harlan’s laboratories. A second activist, Jonathan White, was given a seven-month sentence, suspended for 18 months. The pair, both aged 22, were members of a small group who terrorised staff at Harlan’s three UK sites last year, using hailers to chant “shame on you”, “blood on your hands” and “puppy killers” at employees queuing up in their cars to enter or leave their workplaces. They also claimed that animals in the centres were subject to “horrific neglect”.

One female Harlan worker told the Observer: “When you arrived in the morning, you would have to queue for up to five minutes to get through the gates. Their loudhailers were deafening. They would scream at you that you were a puppy killer and would bang on your car. It was horrible. I was left shaking for hours afterwards.”

Feel the love.

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Shrinking rapidly, it would seem.

Once upon a time conservatives agitated to privatize the U.S. Postal Service.  But hardly anyone on the right cares about the Post Office any more for the simple reason that technology has enabled us to go right around it: we use faxes and emails to transmit documents, pay our bills online, and send packages by UPS or FedEx.  (By the way, when the fax machine was first being brought to the market about 30 years ago, the Post Office petitioned the FCC to require that fax machines could only be placed and used in post offices, on the perfectly consistent bureaucratic rationale that since fax machines could transmit letters, the post office’s legal monopoly on first class mail swept the devices under their authority.  Fortunately the FCC was not persuaded.)

What happened to the Post Office is starting to happen to public education; in a few more years conservatives may stop agitating for school choice and gnashing their teeth about teachers unions, for the simple reason that fewer and fewer people will be sending their kids to public schools.  I saw Rupert Murdoch hold up an iPad at a meeting last year, and declare, “This is what is going to defeat the teachers union.”)

Now, if we can just get them out of our wallets, life will be much better. But … don’t hold your breath.

Meanwhile, Solyndra—remember them? the company Joe Biden promised was producing “good, permanent jobs”?—has released its Chapter 11 bankruptcy plan.  Of the $527 million Solyndra received from taxpayers, they’ll repay . . . $24 million.  I’m sure the Obama Administration will take small bills.  Easier to use as walking around money on election day in November.

Your tax dollars at work. Sort of.

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While Romney denied on Tuesday that his reference was a criticism about Palestinian culture, Palestinian leaders immediately slammed the comment. Palestinian Authority spokesman Saeb Erakat calling it “a racist statement” that ignores the effect occupation has on the Palestinian economy.

What makes Palestinians a unique race has not been explained. But just imagine the outcry if a sitting government official described Palestinians as developing methods “of death and death-seeking. For the Palestinian people death has become an industry at which women excel.”

If a passing reference to “culture” set off Palestinian ire, what might they say about an official saying death is a Palestinian “industry?”

In this case, the comment drew no criticism. It came from Hamas MP Fathi Hammad in remarks broadcast on Hamas’ Al-Aqsa television in 2008. According to a translation by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), Hammad told the enemies of Allah that they “do not know that the Palestinian people has developed its (methods) of death and death-seeking. For the Palestinian people death has become an industry at which women excel and so do all the people living on this land. The elderly excel at this, and so do the mujahideen and the children. This is why they have formed human shields of the women, the children, the elderly and the mujahideen in order to challenge the Zionist bombing machine. It is as if they were saying to the Zionist enemy: ‘We desire death like you desire life.'”

While the ‘Palestinians’ prate about ‘occupation’, they conveniently forget to address the continuing Arab occupation of parts of the Jewish homeland. There are no ‘Palestinians’; they’re Arabs, and if they want their ‘home’ back they should return to Arabia. There’s certainly plenty of room.

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For one thing, the government isn’t trying to run everything.

My wife, a pediatrician, doesn’t post price lists. They’re irrelevant, since very few of her patients pay their own bills. Even regular, predictable expenses are handled by insurance companies, or by government programs, or by convoluted combinations of the two. She loves kids and respects parents and discusses care with them. But many of the important decisions are made elsewhere. There’s little point in going in-depth about possible medications with a Medicaid patient when you’re going to end up playing whack-a-mole with the AHCCCS Formulary — the ever-morphing list of medicines that Arizona’s implementation of Medicaid has decided to pay for this time around.

The idea of removing patients as responsible parties was to remove money from the decision-making process — to give us the illusion that care is free, and that treatment will be provided with no need for us to fret over the bills. It’s not free of course. We’ve just bought the illusion, and transferred the cost-benefit analyses to somebody else. We still get some choices, but unless we’re among the few who pay out of pocket, they’ve been winnowed and pre-approved ahead of time.