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A lawsuit filed against the Cook County sheriff and other county officials by the the MacArthur Justice Center at Northwestern University alleges the systemic use of violence at the jail of the Illinois county where Chicago is located.

Hey, it’s Chicago, Barack Obama’s alma mater. Why the surprise?

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At issue in Monday’s ruling in Kaley v. United States is an area of the law known as asset forfeiture. In essence, asset forfeiture is designed to help law enforcement officials seize the ill-gotten fruits of criminal activity, such as cash, cars, or homes. To that end, prosecutors are permitted to freeze the assets of criminal suspects during trial if there is probable cause to believe those assets constitute “proceeds” of the alleged criminal activity. Notice that this freezing occurs before the suspect has been duly convicted.

That timing matters a great deal to the plaintiffs in this case, a married couple by the name of Kaley who have been indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of selling stolen medical supplies. That may sound like a finding of guilt, but in fact grand jury proceedings are a non-adversarial process where the prosecution alone is permitted to call witnesses and present evidence. The suspects have no opportunity at that point to rebut anything the government alleges against them.

In the wake of the grand jury indictments, the federal government moved to freeze the Kaleys’ assets, including their home and a $500,000 certificate of deposit the couple had recently purchased in order to cover the anticipated legal expenses arising from their trial. Put differently, the government has eliminated their ability to pay their lawyer.

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Diners at eight Gator’s Dockside casual eateries are finding a 1% Affordable Care Act surcharge on their tabs […]’The costs associated with ACA compliance could ultimately close our doors,’ the sign reads. ‘Instead of raising prices on our products to generate the additional revenue needed to cover the costs of ACA compliance, certain Gator’s Dockside locations have implemented a 1% surcharge on all food and beverage purchases only.’

Freeberg puts The Arizona Kerfuffle in a nutshell.

Sorry Sulu. Your Facebook updates are a lot of fun, and nothing against your sexual preference but you’re wrong on this one. In fact, Arizona would be a great place for the silliness to finally stop.

There is: Nobody should force me to pour milk on my corn flakes when I happen to prefer orange juice and vodka on my corn flakes. And then there’s: Help me force this restaurant owner to let me walk into his restaurant and eat my corn flakes. Those are two different things. The first thing is freedom, the second thing is force. Two things. Different. In fact, opposites.

Time for the nonsense to end. You’re not championing choice and freedom anymore, when you’ve started to force other people to accept things they don’t want to.

And that’s all you need to know about that. But he elaborates:

So now we’re left with several realizations that lead to a question. There aren’t too many stories to be offered up about gay people being refused service anywhere, so I don’t think we need to pretend this was about anybody’s “rights.” If we do force that understanding, then we would also have to understand, once and for all, that the gay-rights crusade lately has a cause wholly separate from what they’ve been claiming, and those who have been resisting it were completely correct from the very beginning: It’s about special rights and not equal-rights. Laundromats, bowling alleys, Karate studios, fast food restaurants, liquor stores and bars have always been able to display signs that say “We Reserve The Right To Refuse Service To Anyone.” In Arizona, they don’t have that right. And, it seems the loud-crowd is opposed to any business having that right anywhere…where homosexuals are concerned.

The whole ‘gay rights’ thing isn’t about ‘gay rights’ at all, but about ‘gay privileges’. ‘Gay marriage’ is the poster child here: Homosexuals have the same marriage rights as everybody else: To marry someone of the opposite sex. But that’s not what they want; they want to right to marry someone of the same sex, a ‘right’ that no one has except in certain reality-free jurisdictions. All this handwaving about ‘equality’ is meant to pull the wool over the eyes of the Low Information Voter, the same sort of people who believe something is true because they read it in the newspaper.

Read it.

Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reveals that 71.67 percent of babies aborted in Mississippi are black, while 26.6 percent are white–an outcome that stands in sharp contrast to the fact that whites outnumber blacks in that state by nearly two to one.

Margaret Sanger would be so proud….

Read it.

According to NBC News, police chief Randy Johnson said the guns would help officers with “rapid response” to emergency situations. He said time is of the essence when an attack on a school is underway: “If we don’t get in and stop the shooter, more people are going to die.”

In the old days, the kids and teachers would be packing, and there wouldn’t be a problem. Nowadays, however, schools (and some offices) are merely storehouses of unarmed victims, ripe for the plucking by any wierdo who is willing to ignore ‘gun-control’ laws.

‘All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.’ — Benito Mussolini

Read it.

In a colossal “oh by the way” revelation, last Friday afternoon the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), a federal agency under the United States Department of Health and Human Services (that would be the executive branch run by President Obama), quietly released a report exposing the fact that under Obamacare, two-thirds of Americans who work at small businesses will see their insurance premiums increase. So this report – which is more than two years late – says over 11 million American workers will have higher health insurance premiums because of Obamacare. Despite the administration’s attempts to, as House Speaker John Boehner put it, “delay and deemphasize” the report, we now have it straight from the Obama administration that Obamacare will raise health-insurance premiums for American workers. That is a far cry from Obama’s 2008 campaign promise that families would see lower health insurance premiums – $2,500 lower, to be exact – under Obamacare.

When Obama loses the Washington Post, well….

Read it. And watch the video.

The joys of living in a Blue State.

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Sgt. Maj. Walter Valentine, 89, served in World War II, Korea and Vietnam over three decades with the Marines and then spent another three decades helping comrades make a smooth transition into civilian life when they retire.

Whatever the correct term is the antonym of ‘slacker’, he’s it.

Read it.

I’ll bet she is, I’ll bet she is…. Nudge nudge, wink wink, say no more.

Check it out.

Read it.

Don’t be underneath it when it does.

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I’d be curious as to how many of them were about Global Warming.

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When Oregon land-use laws and rules were written back in the 1970s, timber companies cut down trees, hauled them to the mill, cut them into boards, and sold them to homebuilders. Now, some homebuilders go into the forest, cut down trees, piece together a home on site, then carefully dismantle it to take to the homebuyer’s lot for final assembly.

The problem is that piecing together the home is considered secondary forest processing, which is illegal under Oregon land-use rules for land zoned “timber resource.” As a result, some log homebuilders are being regulated out of business.

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

Rules can be updated, but that takes a lot of time and effort and the mom-and-pop log homebuilders can’t afford to do it or wait for it. In the meantime, those rules stifle innovation and create a bias towards big corporations, which can afford to lobby for changes. They also lead to crony capitalism, in which the wealthy are able to get rules changed for themselves while everyone else pays the cost.

Yup. That’s the way things are in the Obamanation.

Read it. And watch the video.

The rising ire of a national coalition of black pastors reached a climax Tuesday as the organization announced a campaign to call for the impeachment of Attorney General Eric Holder on the basis that he has violated his oath of office by “attempting to impose same-sex ‘marriage’ throughout the nation…”

Any non-black non-Democrat Attorney General would have been impeached long since, but Holder keeps digging in deeper and deeper. People tend to forget that not all black Americans are denizens of the Obamanation.

Read it.

If Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy….

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The Obama campaign offshoot known as Battleground Texas, which was caught on hidden camera by James O’Keefe allegedly violating state law by encouraging volunteers to copy voters’ private telephone numbers from registration forms into their get-out-the-vote database, has doubled down on the practice, claiming that Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott himself sanctioned their conduct in his previously issued legal opinions.

According to Jay Root of the Texas Tribune, Battleground Texas–which is attempting to “turn Texas blue” in helping Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis–now claims that telephone numbers on voter registration forms are “public information.” The group’s lawyer, Graham Wilson, cites Abbott–Davis’s GOP opponent–declaring in 2010 that Dallas County “may not withhold the telephone numbers” from a requestor.

Yet Abbott’s opinion clearly applies only to the county itself. There is also a world of difference between copying telephone numbers directly from voter registration forms–in apparent direct violation of Texas state statute–on the one hand, and filing a formal request through the relevant public authorities, on the other (see below).

Wilson tries to dodge that argument, claiming that a separate opinion from the Texas secretary of state allows volunteers to “copy the relevant information from the application in writing just as you would be able to do if you went to the registrar’s office and pulled a copy of the original application.” The key phrase, however, is “relevant information.” State law does not, apparently, bar copying the name and address from a registration form. It does, however, single out telephone numbers–which Wilson apparently does not try to deny.

Steve Sailer fisks the Gray Lady, not that doing so is much of an effort.

Roles in mainstream movies do go to black actors that weren’t originally written for them — it’s just that those kind of movies don’t get Oscar recognition. Thirty years ago, Beverly Hills Cop was planned around Sylvester Stallone, but Eddie Murphy wound up playing the role. Murphy wasn’t nominated for an Oscar in it, but then Stallone wouldn’t have been either.

…

American Hustle and The Wolf of Wall Street are both period pieces inspired by true stories of white collar criminality, so wouldn’t it be racist to imply that blacks were involved?

That’s raaaacist, Steve. Get it right.

In other words, African-Americans had a poor Oscar year, but non-American blacks had a very good one, but why talk about complications of ethnicity when we can talk about race and keep it simple: black and white?

That is, after all, the main point of the New York Times.

Read it.

On Tuesday it was announced that the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) had decided to allow the group American Atheists to have a booth at this year’s event, but nearly as soon as it was announced, CPAC officials pulled the invitation.

Regardless, the original invitation was enough to spur prominent conservative Brent Bozell to pull out of the longtime conservative event, charging that CPAC is “destroying the conservative movement.”

Which is horseshit, and Bozell ought to know better. Can you be conservative and an atheist? Of course, but that’s not the point. One of the core principles of American conservatism (if, indeed, there is such a thing) is Free Speech, and that means Free Speech for your opponents as well as your friends.

In the CNN report, American Atheists president David Silverman said that his CPAC booth would be a “first step of many” in reaching out to conservatives because he was positive that there were many “closeted atheists” among them.

Indeed there are. Read the blog Secular Right for a good sample, including the Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, John Derbyshire.

“We spoke with Mr. Silverman about his divisive and inappropriate language. He pledged that he will attack the very idea that Christianity is an important element of conservatism. People of any faith tradition should not be attacked for their beliefs, especially at our conference. He has left us with no choice but to return his money,” she said.

But that’s not what he said, if he is being quoted correctly — he said he would attack an idea, not the people holding that idea, and that is what Free Speech is all about. (Sure, maybe he lied, but supporting Free Speech means taking the chance that people will sometimes lie to you. Deal with it.)

Despite having their invite rescinded, that the atheists were approved in the first place did not sit well with Brent Bozell, President of the Media Research Center and an influential conservative leader. Bozell announced that he was pulling out of the conference because of the invitation….

That sounds like a win-win to me — if CPAC needs anything, it’s the absence of people who are of the Free Speech For Me But Not For Thee persuasion.

Reacting to Bozell’s statement, David Bossie, President of Citizens United, told Breitbart that CPAC had “lost its way.”

“When you have a conservative stalwart like Brent Bozell pulling out of CPAC because of the mismanagement of a conference that is supposed to be about conservatism, not republicanism, the conference has lost its way,” Bossie said. “It truly is a shame that every year it seems we have drama surrounding this conference because ACU leadership forgets the three-legged stool of conservatism, which is a strong national defense, belief in the free market, and traditional family values. CPAC is supposed to be a conference for the conservative movement guided by its core principles. If we lose those principles, the conservative movement is dead.”

Couldn’t have said it any better myself.

Read it.

The reason that Mathieu — and many other coaches across most Olympic sports — make certain they always have a specific amount of cash on hand is that if they want to protest an official decision during competition, they need more than just a strong opinion and an angry yell.

They also need money.

Unlike major professional sports like soccer, baseball or football, protests are relatively common in Olympic sports, and each sport’s governing body has strict rules about the protocol. There are time restrictions. There are guidelines on whether the protest can be oral or must be in writing. And there is, ultimately, the bill.

And don’t try to pull out a credit card at the protest table.

Bryan Caplan, a Real Economist, lays it out for ‘progressives’ and other dimwits.

 Walmart’s critics often argue that food stamps, Medicaid, and other poverty programs subsidize its labor force.  Since government pays a big part of its workers’ living expenses, Walmart doesn’t have to.  Is this true?

As long as non-workers remain eligible for poverty programs, the answer is no.  This is basic supply-and-demand.  When the government offers free stuff to people with low incomes, the marginal benefit of work falls – and so does labor supply.  When labor supply falls, hours of work go down, and wages rise.  This could be very nice from the point of view of Walmart’s workers.  From the point of view of Walmart’s stockholders however, it’s bad.

Not convinced?  Ask yourself: “If I ran Walmart, would I favor higher unemployment benefits?”  Of course not.  Why not?  Because higher unemployment benefits make it easier to not apply for a job at Walmart.  The same goes for any government program that makes idleness less unpalatable.

Read it.

Why, it’s even in their name. But apparently ‘progressives’ can’t read.

So total is the cultural victory of the modern Left that the merely to recount this fact is jarring. But few at the time would have found it especially contentious. As George Watson put it in The Lost Literature of Socialism:

It is now clear beyond all reasonable doubt that Hitler and his associates believed they were socialists, and that others, including democratic socialists, thought so too.

The clue is in the name. Subsequent generations of Leftists have tried to explain away the awkward nomenclature of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party as either a cynical PR stunt or an embarrassing coincidence. In fact, the name meant what it said.

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Because God knows that EVERYBODY in the United States has free, high quality education, so we need to air-drop money on an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT continent.

Read it.

This dearth of opportunity extends even into Portland, the state’s dominant city. One recent study showed that earnings for educated male in the city are among the worst in the country. Portland, the land of Ph.D.’s driving cabs and working in coffee shops, notes geographer Jim Russell, “attracts talent for the sake of attracting talent” but does little with them once they arrive. No surprise then that the place has become widely described the “slacker capital of the world.”

Can an entire state fit into a parents’ basement?

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Amtrak has so many empty seats on its trains that it is creating a writers-in-residence program offering free long-distance train rides to writers provided that they tweet their journeys. Despite my skepticism for government subsidies to trains, I love trains and have always dreamed of living on one. So I’m ready to take up my residency.

…

Should Amtrak offer residencies to photographers? Painters? Model railroaders? On average, Amtrak trains only fill half their seats, so there is plenty of room for this program’s expansion.

Read it.

Who will succeed John Dingell now that the long-time legislator is finally retiring from Congress at the age of 87? The smart money is on Debbie Dingell, the congressman’s wife who is three decades younger.

If this happens it will continue the family’s eight-plus decade hold on the seat. John Dingell succeeded his father in 1956.

Ever notice that political ‘dynasties’ are all either Democrats, like the Gores and Kennedys, or semi-Democrats, like the Bushes?

Read it.

With numerous Obamacare cancer patients now telling their nightmare stories, Democrats have declared war against individuals willing to share their struggles with fellow Americans.

Democrats’ latest target: Michigan cancer patient Julie Boonstra. Boonstra says attacks by Democratic Senate candidate Gary Peters’s campaign against her new Obamacare TV ad will not silence her.

“I’m very upset with them for trying to stop my ad,” Boonstra told Fox News. “They’re not scaring me. Cancer scares me. The growth of my cancer, possibly losing my life over this, that scares me. I battle cancer every day. They’re not going to intimidate me.”

Steve Sailer writes the obit.

Uh … the reason New York is the ballet capital of America is because of all the money generated by Wall Street. So, a struggle promising street fighting over who has better aesthetic taste — the people who make the money made on Wall Street or the people who spend the money made on Wall Street — wasn’t ever really going to go anywhere. In the battle between the ballerinas and the Masters of the Universe, there will never be a final victor because there’s way too much fraternizing with the enemy.

Read it.

Or, more accurately, the Global Warming Scare.

Other than AlGore, that is.

Jim Goad rushes in where angels fear to tread.

With all due respect to the Founding Fathers, I do not find it “self-evident” that all men are created equal. If anything, it appears bleedingly obvious that they are highly—even comically—unequal.

A good point that has never, as far as I know, been adequately addressed — just assumed.

Your modern smug-as-a-bug-in-a-rug progressive egalitarian dimwit generally believes in evolution—except for the uncomfortable parts. Have you ever noticed that when you disagree with them about the notion of innate human equality, they immediately condemn you as innately inferior to them? In stereotyping the “racist”—which is by far the most pervasive stereotype in modern society—it’s telling how often racists are depicted as stupid, subhuman, genetically inferior, and stuck in the Stone Age. It appears an indelible trait of human group psychology that people need to feel superior to at least someone, and that someone is currently the “racist” rather than the old standby, the Negro.

The truth is that ‘all men are created equal’ is fundamentally a Christian ides, that all men are equal morally before God, and the most amusing aspect of the current fashionable progressivism is that they simply cannot acknowledge that simple historical fact.

Keeping it simple, I’ll use a baseball analogy. Let’s say the best hitter for the Boston Red Sox bats .350. And, oh, let’s say their worst hitter bats .150. And let’s allege that the team’s batting average is .250.

With me?

And let’s say the New York Yankees’ hitters average .350.

So the difference between the Red Sox’s best and worst hitters is a steep 200 points, while there’s only 100 points between the teams’ averages.

Does this, even for a second, mean the Red Sox and Yankees are equal at batting?

Not if you aren’t a moron.

Read it.

These are certainly among the basic lies that were repeated over and over by Obama and the Democrats leading up to passage of the law:

1. If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.

2. If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.

3. Families will on average save $2500 annually.

4. Obamacare won’t add a dime to the deficit.

Bryan Caplan, a Real Economist, explains it all to you in pictures so even ‘progressives’ will understand it.

Read it.

Google, in an effort to aid environmentalists worried about deforestation, now has a website, an online forest monitoring system, that tracks deforestation in real time around the world. Called Global Forest Watch, it uses curated maps with in-depth reporting regarding forests around the world.

Too bad they won’t think of doing the same for individual liberty — that would be a map I’d be interested in — but, then, individual liberty has never been a priority with the ‘progressives’ at Google; and we live in a world in which more people appear to be concerned about the disappearance of trees than in the disappearance of freedom.

Read it.

The program will also come with some $250 million in private funding, but the $70 million in federal seed money will come from the Department of Defense. President Obama has arranged the funding without Congressional action as part of his pledge to go around Congress.

Read it.

 Back in late 2011 after the Occupy Wall Street protests, Fiat-Chrysler chief executive officer Sergio Marchionne gave a speech in Toronto to decry what he called “the most inane displays of greed.”

The reference was to behaviour he had observed while serving on various company boards over the years.

Just two years before that speech, Chrysler sought (and received) $2.9 billion from Canada’s taxpayers and $12.4 billion from the U.S. government, amid a doomsday scenario for the automotive sector. It was rather cheeky of Marchionne, then, to try and take the side of the “99 per cent.” Chrysler has always been a poster boy for the sort of avarice that some companies inflict on 100 per cent of taxpayers: the ever-constant demand that governments ante up money or a company will shift production to another jurisdiction.

And ‘progressives’ everywhere will criticize capitalism for this.

Dean Burnett writes in The Guardian, a British newspaper that is living proof of Jonah Goldberg’s thesis that National Socialism is just another child of Socialism.

(Actually, my choice would be Henry Tudor prior to Bosworth, but that’s just me.)

Read it. And watch the video.

Matthew Yglesias chides the 1%.

Put aside, for a moment, this instance of a Voice of the Crust growling toward the hand that feeds him.

I don’t say ‘biting the hand that fees him’ because nobody who is in a position to give money to Harvard listens to the likes of Matthew Yglesias.

And here’s why:

Basically what you see is that highly selective institutions are institutions for kids from affluent families. You’ll often hear that such-and-such a donation to an already-wealthy institution is a great idea because it’s going to financial aid. But when only about 5 percent of your class is coming from the bottom quarter of the income distribution (and we can assume that very little of that 5% is coming from the really truly poor) then even this financial aid is extremely poorly targeted. Meanwhile, the demographics of highly selective institutions reveal that highly selective institutions remain what they always have been—mechanisms for the perpetuation of inequality and hierarchy.

Giving $150 million to Harvard accomplishes a number of things:

1. It guarantees that any of your descendants who want to go to Harvard will do so, yea, unto the fourth generation;
2. It buys you status amongst the Crust and its Chattering Class.
3. It gives you a huge tax write-off, typically from securities for which you didn’t pay anything out-of-pocket, thus shielding a lot of future income from the exactions that afflict the likes of Warren Buffet’s secretary.

So this is like a flea saying to a dog: ‘Dog, don’t be that way!’ Or like a Baptist preacher exhorting his congregation not to use drugs. (Dude, if they were the type to use drugs, they wouldn’t be sitting there listening to you.) It’s all just hot air (for which he gets well paid, I presume; I should have such a job).

Now Matthew Yglesias knows this perfectly well, having gone to Dalton and Harvard himself. He knows, as some perhaps do not, that Harvard arranges its admissions policies to admit, not only ‘kids from affluent families’, but those who will produce ‘kids from affluent families’ themselves someday, in the hopes that they will want to send said kinder to Harvard. They quite deliberately skim off the cream of the student applicant universe, which consists of people who would be successful with or without a Harverd education (vide Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, whose key characteristic is not that they graduated from Harvard, which they didn’t, but that they were admitted to Harvard). Harvard is the farmer who figures out where the tallest corn will grow and then lays out his field accordingly, preening at harvest time about his ‘green thumb’ and expertise as a farmer.

Read it.

Scientists in China say they have developed a way to manipulate liquid metal substances into self-assembling shapes and forms.

The researchers, working out of Tsinghua University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, reckon that by applying an electric charge to liquid metal alloys, they could control the behavior of substances and build simple shapes.

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“Will Dropouts Save America?,” asked Michael Ellsberg in a 2011 piece published by The New York Times, a paper that reveres universities and is considered the flagship publication of the American liberal Left.

Ellsberg said most of the high-tech entrepreneurs and the drivers of the Internet economy — from Bill Gates and Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg — were college dropouts, having realized that they were wasting their time in class.

“American academia is good at producing writers, literary critics and historians. It is also good at producing professionals with degrees,” Ellsberg wrote. “But we don’t have a shortage of lawyers and professors. America has a shortage of job creators. And the people who create jobs aren’t traditional professionals, but startup entrepreneurs. … No business in America — and therefore no job creation — happens without someone buying something. But most students learn nothing about sales in college; they are more likely to take a course on why sales (and capitalism) are evil.”

Just as a government exists to hire and pay bureaucrats, a university exists to hire and pay professors — and, increasingly, administrators. Educating students is just a Clever Plastic Disguise, the fig leaf that lets the rest of it go on undisturbed. (Not unlike manufacturing in a heavily unionized industry, come to think of it.)

Read it.

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a tiny device they hope will lower that statistic — it’s a 1.4-millimeter silicon chip that takes real-time, 3D images from inside the heart, coronary arteries, and surrounding blood vessels. Using volumetric imaging, it could better guide doctors through heart surgery and allow them to unclog some patients’ arteries without major surgery.

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He certainly deserves it more than Obama.

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Time zones were introduced because of railroads. You remember railroads?

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The Pine Island Glacier has been much studied over the last two decades, as the rate of ice melting into the sea there has accelerated during those years. Many scientists have theorised that this might be due to global warming caused by human burning of fossil fuels. It’s been suggested that the PIG on its own might cause sea levels to rise by several centimetres this century (for background the seas rose about 17cm in the last century. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change expects this to increase massively this century, though there’s plenty of research to suggest otherwise.)

However it now appears that the recent rapid flow of the PIG into the sea may just be one of those things that happens from time to time, as it did 8,000 years ago. This is borne out by research from 2010, in which BAS boffins sent a robot submarine under the glacier’s projecting ice shelf and found that its acceleration in recent times probably resulted from the fact that it has just finished grinding away a troublesome underwater reef which was slowing it down and causing ice to back up.

Read it.

Yet another instance of a Voice of the Crust going back and re-writing history to pull the wool over the eyes of the Low-Information Voter.

Theodore Dalrymple reflects on one of the least charming aspects of modern life.

People who were charged with a crime in England used to be told by the police that they did not have to say anything, but that anything they did say might be taken down and used as evidence against them. I think we should all be given this warning whenever we use a mobile telephone.

I remember the last days of Ceau?escu’s Romania. If you went to someone’s home, he immediately put a cushion over the telephone because he assumed that it was bugged by a microphone. In embassies diplomats would speak to you only in basements deep in the ground that they believed had been cleared of all electronic apparatuses. But surveillance under Ceau?escu was crude and sporadic by comparison with the surveillance that we all undergo nowadays in free countries.

Read it. And watch the video.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of such ‘activists’ is the Brownshirt tactics they routinely employ in their attempts to combat thoughtcrime among their opponents — tactics that they would rightly regard as ‘human rights violations’ and ‘hate crimes’ if employed against themselves.

Increasingly the term ‘activist’ has come to mean ‘asshole in the service of a political agenda’.

Read it.

But here is the real point: Why is Mrs. Boonstra in this situation at all? She had health insurance coverage that she understood, with which she was perfectly happy, and which provided her with the critical medical services and medicines that she needs to have a chance to stay alive. She was lied to. President Obama told her, dozens of times, that if she liked her health insurance, she could keep it. Other Democrats, like Gary Peters, told her the same thing, even though they knew it was not true. They lied because they needed to lie to pass legislation to concentrate power in Washington. Now, as the result of the Democrats’ lies, Mrs. Boonstra, like millions of other Americans, has lost the insurance policy that she had, and is forced to scramble around to try to cobble together coverage, via a pathetically dysfunctional exchange system, in hopes that it might turn out to be nearly as good as the coverage the Democratic Party took away from her. She is still trying to figure out what her new plan will cost (and when) and what it will and will not cover, even as she continues to battle for her life.

Read it.

A useful reference.