UPDATE II: OMG! Outrage Of The Week (Cry Me A Rivers)

Media, Political Correctness, Private Property, Racism, Reason, Taxation

The post titled “Every Day An Outrage” alerted readers to the cable-news custom of harping on “items meant to heighten emotions and send hissing viewers to social media to create a buzz.” Heightened emotions are also meant to distract the easily distracted from reason and argument.

I just knew that MSNBC, which has hardly reported on the “conflict that has roiled the country”—Cliven Bundy’s “mutiny against the federal government”—would rectify the failure when Bundy said something racist.

Boy, was I right! Check out the article titled “Nevada Rancher Cliven Bundy Doesn’t Apologize, Repeats Racist Remarks.” It constitutes a sudden turnaround in MSNBC’s previous editorial choice to hardly cover the Cliven-Bundy story. “Bundy’s Blunder,” blares another headline.

MSNBC: These are not newsmen, but truly despicable operatives who are incapable of impartially addressing the issues .

Whatever impolitic and politically unpopular things Mr. Bundy says—nothing changes the natural-law truths propounded upon in the essay, “Why The Land Belongs To Bundy.”

Whatever happened to the the old adage about “sticks and stones” and all that stuff?

UPDATED I (4/25): HAVE RACE WILL TRAVEL. Miraculously, CNN has also “discovered” Cliven Bundy, after reporting not at all about the farmer from Nevada, who is in “mutiny against the federal government.”

The little worm Paul Begala was entertained by Brook Baldwin, for a CNN segment aimed not at reporting about land seizures across the country, but in order to strategically deploy Bundy’s racism against the GOP. In fairness to Bimbo Brook, she’s not working with much. She likely knows no better.

As for the Worm Begala: He calls the man, Bundy, “a deadbeat welfare queen.” If he is serious, he should not be taken seriously.

Bundy is a man who works the land and wishes to keep what is his—for that is what taxes are: private property appropriated at the point of a gun.

Tax withheld is stolen property reclaimed.

UPDATE II: CRY ME A RIVERS. Her humor has become way too PC for me to enjoy as I used to. But at least Joan Rivers is refusing to apologize for a joke she made. I hope she doesn’t buckle.

“I’m a comedienne,” she told the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “I know what those girls went through. It was a little, stupid joke. There is nothing to apologize for. I made a joke. That’s what I do. Calm down. Calm [expletive] down. I’m a comedienne. They’re free, so let’s move on.”

What did Joan say?

she made a comparison between her daughter’s guest room and the basement in which Cleveland kidnapping victims Gina DeJesus, Michelle Knight and Amanda Berry were bound, raped and tortured for years before their escape.
“Those women in the basement in Cleveland had more room,” quipped Rivers. …

Legal: The Not-So-Wise Latina Lets Loose

Affirmative Action, Law, Race, Racism, The Courts

What happens when the highest court in the land admits to the bench an individual who emotes rather than reasons, and is without the intellectual wherewithal to tell reason from emotion? You get the not-so-wise Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who delivered an unhinged disquisition in favor of institutionalizing affirmative action forever-after.

On Monday, reports John Fund, “the Supreme Court voted six to two to uphold the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (MCRI), which was passed with support from 58 percent of that state’s voters in 2006. It simply enshrines in Michigan’s constitution that the state should not engage in race discrimination.” (Read “BUSH’S AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AMBUSH” as a refresher.)

But from where Sotomayor is perched, as a confessed recipient of affirmative action (“Sonia SotoSetAsides once admitted that her test scores ‘were not comparable to her colleagues at Princeton and Yale’”), the choice should not be up to Michigan voters.

At 58 pages, her dissent was longer than the opinions of all the other justices combined — and she took the relatively unusual step of reading it passionately from the bench.
“The stark reality is that race still matters,” Sotomayor said. “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race, and to apply the Constitution with eyes open to the unfortunate effects of centuries of racial discrimination.” She went on to chastise the majority’s opinion: “My colleagues misunderstand the nature of the injustice worked by” the Michigan amendment.

At least that excuse for a Chief Justice, John Roberts (the man whose clever casuistry gave us Obamacare’s individual mandate), offered a firm rejoinder to this surly woman:

Roberts directly confronted Sotomayor in his own concurring opinion: “It is not ‘out of touch with reality’ to conclude that racial preferences may themselves have the debilitating effect . . . that the preferences do more harm than good. To disagree with the dissent’s views on the costs and benefits of racial preferences is not to ‘wish away, rather than confront’ racial inequality. People can disagree in good faith on this issue, but it similarly does more harm than good to question the openness and candor of those on either side of the debate.”

More about the career of SotoSetAsides.

State Theft Of Private Property Sets Legal Precedent For More Of The Same

America, Law, Private Property, South-Africa, Taxation, The State

With its monopoly over both law enforcement and “justice,” the state has seen to it that systematic theft serves as legal precedent.

“Long before Cliven Bundy faced down federal agents,” reports Fox News (who else?), “in his dispute with the Bureau of Land Management over grazing rights, fellow Nevada rancher Raymond Yowell, an 84-year-old former Shoshone chief, watched as the BLM seized his herd.”

Adding to that, since 2008 they’ve taken his money as well — in the form of a piece of his Social Security checks.

Yowell’s 132 head of cattle had grazed for decades on the South Fork Western Shoshone Indian Reservation in northeastern Nevada until 2002, when the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) — the same agency at odds with Bundy — seized them. The federal agency sold the cattle at auction and used the proceeds to pay off the portion of back grazing fees it claimed Yowell owed. Once the cattle was sold, the agency sent Yowell a bill for the outstanding balance, some $180,000. They’ve been garnishing his monthly Social Security checks since 2008 to satisfy the debt Yowell says he does not owe.

Tommy Henderson is another victim of state plunder of private property:

The Bureau of Land Management [BLM] took 140 acres of his property and didn’t pay him one cent.
Now, they want to use his case as precedent to seize land along a 116-mile stretch of the river …

In “Into the Cannibal’s Pot,” the issue of land grabs by the ANC, in South Africa, was addressed extensively, down to the heart-breaking mutilation of livestock by state-supported squatters, in the effort to hasten the ethnic cleansing of the Afrikaner farmer. The parallels to what is underway in the USA are greater than even I had foreseen.

Drone On The Attack

Foreign Policy, Justice, Propaganda, Terrorism, War

GOP TV (Fox News) correctly frames delays and exemptions in the implementation of Zero Care as a pre-election ploy. However, the drone-in-chief’s deadly show of force in Yemen, at a crucial time during an election cycle: now that’s all above board. Standard operating procedure. No hidden agenda there.

Obama’s illegal and naturally illicit drone attacks on Yemen are craven and far from ‘successful.’ Fox News cops to at least six civilians killed in the course of taking out “nine suspected Al Qaeda militants.” That’s an almost 50 percent failure rate, if you take on faith the tack offered by those operating outside the law (natural and other). Yes, you’d have to believe the Obama administration that individuals who’ve not been afforded due process of law are guilty. And you’d have to have faith in the same goons that the other casualties are necessary “collateral damage.”

I don’t. Nor should you.

Antiwar.com offers what is likely a more accurate account:

A barrage of US drone strikes across Yemen’s south and east has entered its third day today, and shows no signs of slowing down, as the latest US attacks targeted the Shabwa Province.
With so many of the attacks occurring against remote villages in the hills of Yemen’s rural interior, the death toll is difficult to ascertain, but at least 68 are believed to be dead over the past three days.
Yemeni officials say the strikes are targeting “top leader” of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), and that they have high hopes they may kill one such leader, but they can’t confirm anything of the sort so far.
Indeed, while all of the official statements from Yemen have termed the slain “militants” or at the very least “suspects,” not a single person has been identified at all so far officially, and many civilians were confirmed among the slain on Saturday.

To listen to other US mainstream media, it’s hard to ascertain who exactly is responsible for raining drones down on the southern and eastern parts of Yemen. The passive voice is deployed to conceal culpability.

“A ‘massive and unprecedented’ assault against al Qaeda fighters in Yemen appears to be targeting high-level operatives of the terrorist network,” writes CNN. In reading the article @ CNN.com it’s near impossible to determine for sure whodunit.