harmonicminer

Here is Dennis Prager on California and the Titanic:California and the Titanic:

OK, riddle fans, here’s a toughie: What’s the difference between California voters and the passengers on the Titanic?

The passengers on the Titanic didn’t vote to hit the iceberg.

Most Americans understand that California is sinking. What is almost incredible is that it has voted to sink.

On Election Day, 2010 Californians voted Democrats into every statewide position (one is still undecided). This is the party that singlehandedly has brought one of the world’s greatest economies to near ruin. There may well be historical parallels to what Californians did — but I cannot think of any.

A listener called my radio show two days after the elections to tell me that his business is booming — thanks to Californians. His occupation? He’s a real estate agent in Phoenix, Ariz.

The middle class has begun to leave California. It is, of course, impossible for most members of such a large group to leave a state; few people leave their family, their friends, their job and their home except under the most dramatic circumstances. But this fact makes all the more noteworthy the exodus from California that has been taking place.

You have to wonder how many businesses and individuals would leave California if their friends and family could also leave, if they could find a comparable job elsewhere and if they could sell their homes without losing money. What you don’t have to wonder about is who would stay under those conditions. The state of California would eventually be left largely with those groups who voted Democrat in this election: rich liberals (such as those who live in Nancy Pelosi’s Marin County, in the bay area and in West Los Angeles); state and municipal workers (who vote Democrat in as direct a pay-for-vote scheme as a law-based society allows); those who rely on state and city governments for entitlements; and those Latinos who either fall into the last category or who unfortunately identify the Republican Party with anti-Latino sentiments because it opposes illegal immigration.

Those who believe in individual responsibility, the free market and personal liberty are a minority in California. We greet each other as Americans would greet each other meeting in a foreign country.

We watch as one of the greatest places in the world — with its extraordinary natural beauty, almost uniquely beautiful weather and agricultural abundance — wastes all of this as a result of having become a left-wing experiment. What is particularly saddening is to see a state whose success was achieved because it was a Mecca for the adventurous in spirit do everything possible to crush that spirit and drive away those who have it.

There is a silver lining here: clarity. Americans living elsewhere need not elect liberal Democrats to know what will happen if they do. They only need to look at California if they want to see what happens to a state governed by the left (and, for that matter, they can look at Texas to see what happens to a state’s finances when governed by the right).

The left and its teachers unions have ruined public education in California. The left and its public service unions have saddled the state with $500 billion in unfunded pension liability. California’s left-governed cities have set themselves up as “sanctuary cities” for those who have come into America illegally. And the left passes more and more rules governing the behavior of California citizens. Two examples: San Francisco just banned McDonald Happy Meals because they come with a toy and therefore entice children to eat fattening food; and the Democratic legislature has made it illegal for a California employer — even in a retail operation — to ask a male employee who comes to work wearing a dress to wear men’s clothing while at work.

And to render the Titanic analogy even more accurate, Californians voted to retain a law that was described by George Will as one “that preposterously aims to cool the planet by requiring a 30 percent reduction of carbon emissions by 2020.”

That law will ensure that California taxes energy use more than any other state. That, in turn, is guaranteed to increase unemployment and the cost of living in the state — one more reason businesses and productive individuals are leaving, but rarely moving, into California.

Environmentalist true believers have free reign in California. They have convinced a majority of the state’s voters to believe the increasingly absurd notion that human carbon dioxide emission is heating up the planet to temperatures so high that humanity and the earth will suffer cataclysmic consequences.

To return to our Titanic metaphor, the great difference between that ill-fated ship’s crew and California’s crew (its voters and the California Democratic Party) is that the Titanic’s crew did everything possible to avoid hitting the iceberg; California’s crew did everything possible to hit it. Perhaps they believe global warming will melt it before they get there.

Rio police targeting slum where gang based

Elite police units in borrowed navy tanks rumbled through a heavily fortified slum Thursday in an effort to apprehend drug gang leaders they blame for five days of widespread violence even as scores of armed youth fled the shantytown for a neighboring area.

Authorities say the gangs have erected roadblocks on major highways to rob motorists en masse, torched more than 40 cars and buses, and shot up police outposts, all to protest against a security program that has been pushing them from slums where they’ve held sway for decades.

The officers arrived under the cover of police helicopters and amid the constant rattle of high-caliber gunfire despite the gang members’ efforts to block access with burning vehicles.

But scores of gangsters were seen fleeing down jungle-covered hills, across an area known as “the green hell,” to a neighboring gang stronghold, the Alemao slum.

Is this impossible in the USA? Could things get this bad in our border cities and other border areas?

Well…. yes. If we let it happen.

We already have places where the federal government has placed signs warning civilians not to enter, areas along the US/Mexico border, in US territory.

The facts on how many terrorists the TSA has caught by “screening”:

In nearly a decade there is not a single report of a terrorist having been caught during the TSA screening process. No bombs have been discovered. No hijackings have been thwarted. For the TSA to claim it has made the nation’s skies safer is as absurd as the rooster taking credit for the sun rising each morning. Observant passengers have caught more terrorist-wannabes than the 67,000 TSA employees.

It is possible, I suppose, that some terrorist hasn’t tried a particular technique because they knew the TSA was there.  But global screening procedures applied to everyone can’t defeat inventive terrorists indefinitely.

What will TSA do when an airplane is finally taken down by an explosive internal to the human body that can’t be detected by any procedure the TSA now has, including body scans and pat downs?  Start xraying the internal organs and joints from head to toe of every passenger?

It’s only a matter of time until TSA has to take the approach that El Al takes.  The only question is how many people will die because of TSA refusal to profile before it is forced to change policy.  Does anyone think a determined suicide bomber would shrink from having the bomb inserted surgically?

Sadly, it is probably only a matter of time.

The problem with this, of course, is that most of us don’t look very good in abbreviated swim-wear. And airports are often cold. I’m not anxious to see most flyers in a bikini.

The last time I flew, the TSA guy confiscated my breath mints (the little breath assure capsules with parsley oil in them). They were foil backed, and that set off the scanner… and I suppose they might have been explosive or something. Or maybe the TSA guy was just an idiot.

You decide.

The reporting is either lazy or agenda-driven… hard to tell which, in the yahoo story that ‘Sarah Palin’s Alaska’ ratings drop 40 percent in week two

 

A week after a record-breaking debut, Sarah Palin’s reality show saw its audience drop nearly 40 percent on Sunday night.

According to preliminary ratings, just 3 million people watched the second episode of “Sarah Palin’s Alaska.” That’s down from the nearly 5 million who watched the Nov. 14 debut episode, which was the highest-rated premiere episode in TLC’s history.

 One problem: Palin’s show is losing ground with viewers aged 18-49. Per The Hollywood Reporter’s James Hibbard, just 885,000 in that key viewing demographic watched the show—down 44 percent from last week. The median age of the show: 57 years old—15 years older than the average TLC viewer.

So what’s wrong with the story?  It suggests that Palin’s Alaska is in trouble in as a show, or is a disappointment in some way.  But the reality is quite different.  Even with a “mere” 3 million viewers, it easily tops the best ratings TLC ever gets for it’s most popular shows.  It wouldn’t have taken the reporter for the story above long to find this information, if the reporter had bothered to look.

As the 2012 election heats up, look for worse and worse reporting on Palin.  Ignore most of it.

In a triumph of Stalinist reverse meaning, they call it the dream act.

It would seem that in US Federal Court, justice really is blind, as the NYTimes reports on the Acquittal on All but One Charge for Ghailani, Ex-Detainee

The first former Guantánamo detainee to be tried in a civilian court was acquitted on Wednesday of all but one of more than 280 charges of conspiracy and murder in the 1998 terrorist bombings of the United States Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

The case has been seen as a test of President Obama’s goal of trying detainees in federal court whenever feasible, and the result seems certain to fuel debate over whether civilian courts are appropriate for trying terrorists.

The defendant, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, 36, was convicted of one count of conspiracy to destroy government buildings and property. He was acquitted of four counts of conspiracy, including conspiring to kill Americans and to use weapons of mass destruction.

Because of the unusual circumstances of Mr. Ghailani’s case, after he was captured in Pakistan in 2004, he was held for nearly five years in a so-called black site run by the Central Intelligence Agency and at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the prosecution faced significant legal hurdles even getting his case to trial.

On the eve of Mr. Ghailani’s trial last month, the government lost a key ruling that may have seriously damaged its chances of winning convictions.

In the ruling, the judge, Lewis A. Kaplan of Federal District Court in Manhattan, barred prosecutors from using an important witness against Mr. Ghailani because the government had learned about the man through Mr. Ghailani’s interrogation while he was in C.I.A. custody, where his lawyers say he was tortured.

Rangel guilty: House ethics panel rules misconduct

New York Rep. Charles Rangel, a longtime power in the U.S. House, violated its rules with financial misconduct, brought it discredit and will be punished, fellow lawmakers sitting as jurors ruled on Tuesday.

Protesting the enduring stain on his four-decade congressional career, the 80-year-old Democrat said he was treated unfairly for “good faith mistakes.” His statement reflected the bitterness of an eight-month career slide, starting with an unrelated ethics ruling that forced him from his coveted chairmanship of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee.

The conduct often cited by critics was his failure to report income to the IRS from a unit he owned in a Dominican Republic resort, showing the chairman in charge of tax legislation shortchanged the IRS.

Rangel, a founder of the Congressional Black Caucus, remains a political kingpin in New York’s famed Harlem neighborhood and is unlikely to resign. He won re-election earlier this month.

A Republican caught in what amounts to income tax evasion, especially one who is in charge of writing the rules the rest of us have to follow, would probably have been pressured to resign by fellow Republicans. He would be unlikely to be re-elected.  The media’s calls for his resignation would be frequent and stentorian.  He’d probably win a “worst person in the world award” from Keith Olbermann.

It seems that in Rangel’s district, the content of a man’s character is the last thing that matters to the voters.