Saturday, May 22, 2010

Weekend Newsbites: Sat. & Sun., May 22 & 23


In honor of in-law-kinda-sorta Jeanne, I bring you not just one - but two - weekend newsbite theme songs!

Live... Love... LEARN...

11 comments:

William R. Barker said...

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.818e03363d37aed733b8e1d6484580c4.511&show_article=1

Britain faces an "age of austerity" as the new coalition government readies aggressive cuts in public spending to slash the deficit, Treasury minister David Laws told the Financial Times on Saturday.

* GIVE ME THE "AGE OF AUSTERITY" OVER "THE AGE OF OBAMA" ANY DAY OF THE WEEK!

Laws, chief secretary to the Treasury in Prime Minister David Cameron's coalition, will outline plans on Monday to make £6 billion (€6.9 billion, $8.7 billion) of cuts in the current 2010/2011 year.

* WHILE HERE IN THE STATES THE DEMOCRAT CONTROLLED CONGRESS REFUSES TO EVEN FORMULATE A BUDGET AND THE PRESIDENT APPOINTS A "COMMISSION" TO SEEK AND PROVIDE "OPTIONS."

* NAH... NOTHING WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE, HUH... (*SMIRK*)

Finance minister George Osborne...will...unveil an emergency budget on June 22. "The budget is going to have to set out, in a really credible and decisive and aggressive way, the action that we're going to have to take to reduce the deficit," Laws said.

* JUNE 22. ARE YOU READING THIS...?!?! THEY JUST TOOK OFFICE A WEEK AGO AND THEY EXPECT TO UNVEIL THEIR FIRST BUDGET ONE MONTH FROM TODAY.

William R. Barker said...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704852004575258643671613242.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinion

Pay-as-you-go, or PAYGO, rules require that new entitlement spending and new tax cuts must be paid for dollar-for-dollar with entitlement spending cuts or tax increases.

As Paul Ryan, the ranking Republican member of the House Budget Committee has noted, the Democrats under Speaker Nancy Pelosi "have violated pay-as-you-go rules by nearly $1 trillion" over the past three years.

And they're not done.

(*SMIRK*)

In the coming weeks, say Congressional Republicans, we should expect some $300 billion of expenditures that Democrats will declare "emergency spending" and thus do not have to be offset by other spending cuts.

The list includes $60 billion for a military supplemental spending bill; $23 billion for education; and $170 billion for jobless and other welfare benefits.

* NOTHING "EMERGENCY RELATED" ABOUT ANY OF THIS SPENDING.

All said, the deficit could climb to $1.7 trillion from the current record high $1.4 trillion. "I really can't think of the last time the Democrats paid for anything they want to spend money on," Mr. Ryan grumbles.

William R. Barker said...

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/world/asia/23korea.html?hp

A new American intelligence analysis of a deadly torpedo attack on a South Korean warship concludes that Kim Jong-il, the ailing leader of North Korea, must have authorized the torpedo assault, according to senior American officials who cautioned that the assessment was based on their sense of the political dynamics there rather than hard evidence.

The officials said they were increasingly convinced that Mr. Kim ordered the sinking of the ship, the Cheonan... “We can’t say it is established fact,” said one senior American official who was involved in the highly classified assessment, based on information collected by many of the country’s 16 intelligence agencies. “But there is very little doubt, based on what we know about the current state of the North Korean leadership and the military.”

William R. Barker said...

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE64L0X020100522?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton passed out teddy bears to Chinese children as she toured the Shanghai World Expo on Saturday and carefully skirted the United States' many policy disputes with China.

Dressed in a powder blue jacket to match the Expo's plump, cartoonish mascot, Clinton walked through the U.S. and Chinese national "pavilions" shaking hands, posing for pictures and talking up the importance of people-to-people ties.

She avoided any public discussion of the issues that will occupy her in Beijing, including North Korea's suspected sinking of a South Korean warship...

William R. Barker said...

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/may/22/senators-obama-admin-keeps-congress-dark-intel/

The Obama administration has failed to keep congressional intelligence officials in the loop on the investigation into the botched Times Square bombing, as required by law, the top Democrat and Republican on the Senate intelligence committee charged in a letter this week.

* "...AS REQUIRED BY LAW." (*SNORT*) "...LAW." (*LAUGHING OUT LOUD*)

"Having to fight over access to counterterrorism information is not productive and ultimately makes us less secure," wrote Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein and Vice Chairman Christopher S. "Kit" Bond in a letter to President Obama on Thursday.

* DIANNE FEINSTEIN... (*SHRUG*)

William R. Barker said...

http://www.thebatt.com/2.8482/attention-u-s-citizen-do-not-defend-yourself-1.1183351

I magine you live in a small border town in southern Arizona. Every day on the news, you hear reports of murders and drug violence in the area, and the body count is alarmingly high.

Now imagine that one day, you come across a group of Mexican nationals who are squatting on your property.

This happened to Roger Barnett, an Arizona rancher. He detained the group at gunpoint for his own safety and called the U.S. Border Patrol.

* GOOGLE "ROGER BARNETT" - THEN TELL ME AMERICA IS NOT IN SERIOUS NATIONAL DECLINE.

As a gesture of gratitude, the jury ordered him to pay the illegal aliens $77,800 in damages.

This has to be one of the most idiotic cases ever tried in an American court. It makes a complete mockery of the judicial system, punishing a man who made a citizen's arrest and contacted the proper authorities.

And Barnett was, indeed, punished.

Of the $77,800 he was forced to pay, $60,000 of it was for punitive damages. Punitive damages are charged to punish a defendant for wrongdoing in a civil court case.

Barnett has a legal right to make a citizen's arrest in Arizona. A judge affirmed that right in court, yet the jury awarded the criminals thousands.

This should be a valuable lesson to Americans for two reasons. It shows that the federal government has no intention of securing the border with Mexico, and is in no way concerned about Americans' rights there. If the government really wanted to make the border safe, it would protect people like Barnett in court. He didn't participate in any vigilante justice; he told the criminals to stay put while he contacted the authorities.

William R. Barker said...

http://www.king5.com/news/local/Investigators-Edmonds-rape-suspect-deported-nine-times-94637479.html

[A]n illegal immigrant accused of raping a woman in Edmonds [Washington] Sunday has been deported nine times.

That's much more than previously reported.

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement won't comment on the case of Jose Lopez Madrigal.

Madrigal's arrest and immigration record includes a staggering number of contacts with law enforcement since 1989. That's the year he was convicted of theft using a firearm in California.

He was deported a couple of times after that. Then in 1999, he was arrested for drug sales in both San Diego and San Francisco. Records show that he was deported three times that year between April and August.

He was arrested for drugs again in Stockton, Calif. in 2000. In 2002, he pleaded to third degree sexual assault in Denver. Later that year, he was deported again. And in 2003, records show he was deported three more times.

* SO... JUST TO REVISIT THE TIMELINE... BUSH THE ELDER... CLINTON... BUSH THE YOUNGER... AND NOW OBAMA..

William R. Barker said...

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/may/24/go-back-to-mexico/

Mexico's President Felipe Calderon ought to know a lot about illegal immigrant abuse. His country has one of the worst migrant human-rights records in the world.

During his state visit last week, Mr. Calderon repeatedly - and with support and encouragement from the White House and congressional Democrats - made his opinions known on a variety of American domestic issues, including immigration and gun control. He took particular aim at Arizona's new law concerning illegal aliens, absurdly describing it as "violating the human rights of all people."

Criticism from Mexico on immigration issues is nothing new, but rarely has it been so bold, and such salvos have never been launched from U.S. soil. It might be considered bad manners except for the fact that the foreign leader was promoting President Obama's domestic agenda.

* I DON'T CARE WHAT YOUR POLITICS ARE... TO WATCH THAT VIDEO CLIP OF MANY/MOST (???) CONGRESSIONAL DEMOCRATS GIVING CALDERON A STANDING OVATION AS HE DIRECTLY DISSED ONE OF OUR FIFTY UNITED STATES... DISGUSTING.

William R. Barker said...

http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/99103-unions-100m-to-save-the-dems

At least two influential unions will spend close to $100 million on the 2010 election, with most of those funds going to protect incumbents.

The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) plans to spend in excess of $50 million during the 2010 campaign, part of which will fund “a massive incumbent protection program,” according to Gerry McEntee, president of the union.

AFSCME spent roughly $67 million on its political activities in 2008. But the $50 million slated for the 2010 elections is the largest expenditure the union will make in a midterm election, according to union officials.

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) plans to spend $44 million in total on its 2010 election program. The union spent $85 million on its 2008 campaign, according to union officials.

A third labor group said it plans to spend big in 2010 but wouldn’t get into specific numbers. Karen Ackerman, the AFL-CIO’s political director, told reporters on Wednesday that the labor federation will be active in 18 states, will campaign in gubernatorial and Senate races and will likely have a role in 60 to 70 House races this election. She declined to give a dollar amount. “The field is very large, maybe even more races than there was in 2008,” Ackerman said. The AFL-CIO official said the labor movement sees 2010 as “a very hard election, maybe the hardest yet” and wants to see the “many, many good progressive members of Congress” return to Capitol Hill.

William R. Barker said...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/dominic_lawson/article7133920.ece

* WHAT ONE FOREIGNER THINKS OF US - COURTESY OF THE LONDON TIMES:

There is no official league table for political lies. Some of us will be able to find it in our hearts to forgive a form of dissembling that others would regard as beyond salvation. Yet a candidate for office who, having gone to great lengths to avoid military combat, seeks public support on the basis of his invented active service would, you might think, be completely unelectable. Not necessarily, or so it seems, in America.

* I JUST HOPE THAT THE VOTERS OF CONNECTICUT AREN'T AS ETHICALLY CHALLENGED AS I FEAR THEY MAY BE.

The frontrunner for a vacant seat in the US Senate, Richard Blumenthal, has been exposed as behaving in exactly this fashion; but he has no intention of giving up his fight to become the Democratic senator for Connecticut, and neither Barack Obama nor the vice-president, Joe Biden, has withdrawn support for Blumenthal’s candidacy.

* IT'S DISGUSTING; IT TRULY IS. WHAT SORT OF PEOPLE ARE THESE...???

A couple of years ago, during her campaign to be the Democrats’ presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton...told an audience of generals and admirals how she had landed “under sniper fire” at the US military outpost in Tuzla, during the Bosnian conflict, and that “there was supposed to be some kind of greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.”

When journalists who had accompanied Mrs Clinton on that trip declared this to be a fantasy, she stuck to her guns (so to speak).

Then CBS unearthed its footage from 1996 of Clinton arriving at the Tuzla airbase. It showed the following: no sniper fire. No running for cover.

(Oh, and Clinton, accompanied by her daughter Chelsea, receiving a bouquet of flowers from an eight-year-old Bosnian girl in a charming greeting ceremony.)

Thus caught out, a clearly confused Clinton rambled: “You know, I say a lot of things - millions of words a day - so if I misspoke, that was just a misstatement.”

John Kerry for years allowed it to be said - falsely - that his family came from Ireland: in Boston that was much more helpful than the truth, which was that his family was of Czech-Jewish origin.

* IN ORDER: 1) BLUMENTHAL; BIGGEST SCUMBAG... 2) CLINTON; #2... 3) KERRY; DISHONORABLE MENTION. (*RUEFUL CHUCKLE*)

William R. Barker said...

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/05/23/redistricting_away_consent_105612.html

Pollster Scott Rasmussen points out in his new book, In Search of Self-Governance, that high incumbency reelection rates are a recent and troubling change in our politics.

What has changed...? Gerrymandering, on a massive and...scale.

Though it's not a new phenomenon, the attempts at gerrymandering - drawing up districts with the clear intention of creating "safe" seats for certain select candidates to win - have become more effective and much more common, thanks to more accurate survey techniques and perhaps also to a general decline of shame.

In many states, it's simply the normal way of doing business.

Every ten years it comes time to reapportion House seats and state districts according to new U.S. Census population figures. This sparks pitched struggles in state legislatures across the nation. Typically, the party in power uses the redistricting process to its advantage. ... The minority party or representatives of distinct voting blocs are usually complicit in maintaining the current corrupt system, or at least not distressed to see reforms fail.

Why? Because they like predictability, and the current system guarantees a certain number of safe seats for minority and minority party candidates.

* SUCH GERRYMANDERING IS ILLEGITIMATE AND A DIRECT AND CONTINUING ASSAULT UPON THE BASIC TENET OF ONE PERSON, ONE VOTE. THESE LEGISLATORS ARE MANIPULATING THE DEMOCRATIC PROCESS TO SERVE THEIR OWN ENDS. IT'S UNFAIR, UNNECESSARY, AND SHOULDN'T BE ALLOWED.