• Mainstream press has stumbled on an alarming figure, which I reported way back on 8/28/2009 : “nearly 1 in 5 Americans is either out of work or under-employed.”
The real unemployment rate is 16.3 percent. The discrepancy between the official and the awful numbers has arisen because the former count, conveniently, “only those who have looked for work in the last four weeks.”
• Climagedon or, rather, ClimaGate. Reports The IBD: “Hacked e-mails from Britain’s Climate Research Unit are only the latest evidence of climate fraud. Just ask NASA’s James Hansen about the faking of climate data or EPA employees about the suppression of climate fact.”
For years, noted scientists and other global warming skeptics have been accused of being on the take, their research tainted and funded by grants from Big Oil and other fossil-fuel interests.
Now, it turns out, it’s the warm-mongers who are fudging the numbers and concealing the inconvenient truth.
• To further hobble the economy and contribute to the climate chicanery, the president “will proposean emissions reduction target at a U.N. climate change summit in Copenhagen next month, the White House said Monday. … Obama said during his trip to Asia last week that the U.S. and China want the Copenhagen summit to lead to an agreement that has ‘immediate operational effect.'”
• Finally, “Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the others are going to plead ‘not guilty.'” Read the cuss-studded comments from the Daily Kos coterie.
This is an unremarkable defense. Still, Obama will rue the day he brings this circus to New York. Posturing on the Left and the Right will not change the fact that a show trial of the 9/11 defendants will turn into a farce.
In a procedure that was aptly dubbed “Cash For Cloture,” “The Senate voted on Saturday to begin full debate on major health care legislation,” reports the NYT, “propelling President Obama’s top domestic initiative over a crucial, preliminary hurdle in a formidable display of muscle-flexing by the Democratic majority. … The 60-to-39 vote, along party lines, clears the way for weeks of rowdy floor proceedings that will begin after Thanksgiving and last through much of December.”
I have not found a news report that specifies which of the Bill’s permutations will proceed in the Senate.
“Liberty is a simple thing. It’s the unassailable right to shout, flail your arms, even verbally provoke a politician [or a policeman], unmolested. Tyranny is when those small things can get you assaulted, incarcerated, injured, and even killed. Evidence of tyranny in America is mounting” (“Tasers ‘R’ Us”)
You might call Heather Ellis’s behavior rude. That’s how the authorities described her cutting the queue at Walmart and refusing to be “removed” from the store by police. But for “belligerence,” The Machine brought the full force of the state down on Ellis. She was charged with “disturbing the peace, trespassing, resisting arrest and assaulting police officers,” and could have faced a jail term of 15 years.
In case you think I’m minimizing her crimes, let me not omit that Ellis also “stiffened her body” when the brutes tried to place her in the police car.
My oh my: doesn’t Heather know that as a subject she ought to have complied with her sovereigns?
Dr. Boyce Watkins, who spoke eloquently on her behalf on CNN, asked: “If ‘no one was seriously injured,’ why was she facing up to 15-years in prison?”
Heather Ellis took a plea deal.Writes Watkins: “According to the terms of the deal, Ellis will plead guilty to disturbing the peace and resisting arrest. She will also serve a year of unsupervised probation, attend an anger management course and serve four days in jail before the end of the year. Also, if she stays out of trouble for the year, the charges will be sealed and the arrest will not be on her permanent record.”
Imagine being forced into this predicament, when you are innocent in the natural law.
Statism, not racism, is at work here. But being black and alleging racism might have saved this woman from a fate far worse.
A good dose of anti-authoritarianism didn’t hurt Ellis and her supporters. Given their distrust of the state, blacks are often more defiant of the American police state. It serves them in good stead.
Update I (Nov. 23): I watched a segment of the reality show COPS. Two female police officers responded to a domestic altercation and ended up arresting the crying woman for the offense of not replying right away to the law’s queries. The bully babe in uniform explained to the poor woman that she was being arrested becasue she needed to be taught a lesson: “If a cop asked you something, you respond right away, you hear?”
Let’s see if I got this right: a woman in trouble calls the cops, who just about break down her door, yell at her for being out of it and cuff her, leaving children and an elderly mother unattended.
To serve and protect.
This kind of outlaw conduct from cops is clearly more common than we think. Having observed it, I’d have to conclude that it is best not to invite the bastards into one’s home.
Update II: A reader hereunder brings up the travesty that is the plea bargain, an abomination that is presented in every episode of “Law And Order” as a matter-of-fact route to “justice.” The truth is that such “wheeling and dealing” is anything but. This from “TRUTH OBSCURED IN JOHNNY JIHAD’S PLEA BARGAIN“:
There’s a reason the American Constitution emphasizes “the right of trial by jury.” The justice system’s mandate is to unveil the truth. This can only be done in a court of law, and in accordance with due process. The plea bargain is nothing more than a negotiated deal which subverts the very goal of the justice system: In the process of hammering out an agreement that pacifies both prosecution and defense, truth usually falls by the way. As the predominant method of adjudication in the United States, the plea bargain taints the system.
It’s hard to know what to make of this bit of information relayed by FoxNews. Is it possible that from one corner of his mouth Obama is vowing a proper investigation, and from the other corner he is halting the inquiry?
The Senate Armed Services Committee postponed its Monday briefing on the deadly Fort Hood massacre at the behest of the White House, despite calls from some lawmakers to press forward with a congressional investigation into the shooting rampage that killed 13 and wounded 29.
An aide to committee chairman Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., told Fox News that the meeting is delayed “at the request of the administration.” Army Secretary John McHugh and Army Chief of Staff Gen George Casey were to have briefed committee members privately on the shooting.
