City makes large protest signs into criminal offense

In the city of San Mateo, California, violations of city code which had been mere infractions can now be charged as criminal (misdemeanor) offenses and punished with jail time.  The San Mateo Daily Journal reports:

Going forward, any violators of city code can either face an infraction or misdemeanor. Misdemeanors, however, will only be issued by police officers or the Harbor Patrol Master and infractions can be issued by a wide range of city workers including building and fire inspectors. The penalty for an infraction will be a simple fine while the penalty for a misdemeanor could land the violator in jail. . . . .

Gardeners with noisy leaf blowers or protesters with signs too big could now face criminal charges based on a police officer’s discretion, a fact that does not sit well with [City Councilman Robert] Ross.  [Emph. added]

Liberal insanity

Gay activists continue to boycott only state in Middle East that doesn't execute them

Hat tip: LegalInsurrection.

Racism hypocrisy at the New York Times

Newsbusters reports (h/t LegalInsurrection):

Veteran New York Times media reporter David Carr’s Monday column self-righteously attacked an unfortunate headline on an ESPN mobile website, “Chink in the Armor,” that was widely interpreted as a purposeful slur on the ethnicity of benchwarmer-turned-NBA-sensation Jeremy Lin: “Media Hype For Lin Stumbles On Race.”

Giving no benefit of the doubt to the ESPN editor, who has since been fired, Carr declared the headline one of myriad “underlying racist tropes that still lurk in the id of American sports journalism.” This lecture comes from a reporter who last year characterized Midwesterners as folks with “low-sloping foreheads,” akin to cavemen. [Emph. added]

PREVIOUSLY on the subject of liberal hypocrisy:
•Chimichanga and racism hypocrisy
•A liberal's core beliefs are surprisingly malleable
•Private equity firm hypocrisy at the Obama campaign
•Occupy Portland and Michael Moore's hypocrisy
•President Obama preaches Tolerance
•Dem attack against lobbyists is led by a Dem lobbyist
•Minimum wage and hypocrisy
•UN humanitarian hypocrisy
•Eco-hypocrisy at the UN Climate Change conference
•Dems, taxes, and hypocrisy
•Eco-hypocrite of the day: movie director James Cameron
•Liberal gay bashing
•Poster child hypocrisy
•Eco-hypocrisy: Supermodel Gisele and Prince Charles
•Eco-hypocrisy: Barack Obama
•Eco-hypocrisy: Nancy Pelosi
•The ever-increasing energy use of Al Gore's mansion
•With five private jets, Travolta still lectures on global warming
•Edwards' hypocrisy on the poor
•HuffPost blogger projects enviro-hypocrisy

Media hypocrisy

In the Wall Street Journal, William McGurn observes:

When Mr. Obama used a prayer breakfast earlier this month to suggest that the Gospel of Luke was a call for raising taxes on the wealthy, the press corps yawned. When Mr. Santorum complained about the "phony theology" behind the president's worldview, suddenly it landed on every front page and lead every news show.

The MSM is what it is.

Germany's supply-side policy victories

Why is Germany experiencing solid economic growth while America suffers stagnation? Donald Luskin and Lorcan Kelly, writing in the Wall Street Journal, explain:

Starting in 2003, Germany under then-Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder began to implement a program of long-term structural reform called "Agenda 2010." The idea was to transform Germany into an economy where business has an incentive to invest, and where labor has an incentive—and an opportunity—to work. This was pro-growth reform that would be very familiar to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

The centerpiece were labor-market reforms designed by a former human-resources executive at Volkswagen AG. The power of unions and craft guilds was curtailed, making it easier for unskilled youth to enter the job market and easier for employers to hire and fire at will. Germany's lavish unemployment benefits were sharply cut back. An unemployed person in social-democratic Germany today can draw benefits for only about half as long as his counterpart in capitalist America.

In addition, Germany rejected Obama's Keynesian stimulus ideas for a more sane fiscal policy.

It has come to this: European socialists know more about making free markets work than our American president.

PREVIOUSLY on Obamanomics:
•The Obama first term debt: $70,000 per family
•Obamanomics: maximize the uncertainty
•Obamanomics: its intellectual foundations explained
•Strangling business is no way to create jobs
•CEOs to Obama: Get out of the way!
•Survey of CEOs: Obamanomics is still the problem

•A CEO explains how Obama's policies damage the economy
•CEO: businesses are "frightened to death" of Obamacare and Obama's regulatory overreach

•Obamanomics and the prolonged recession
•How to lie with statistics
•3M: “Politicians forget that business has choice"
•Obamacare: Corporatism in action
•Obama 0, Germany 1:
•Medical insurance prices rising due to ObamaCare
•Laws of Economics 1; Obama 0
•Why Liberal economics fails: redistribution does not create wealth (Illustrated)
•Obamacare endangers student health
•Why business isn't hiring
•Dodd-Frank finance "reform" bill stops bond market cold
•Why unemployment insurance must be extended (illustrated)
•Obamanomics still failing, Washington Post discovers
•Russia goes supply-side
•Study: Liberals are economically illiterate

OccupyFail: Corporations as people

The Citizens United Supreme Court decision affirming that corporations have free speech rights continues to rankle the left. At last Thursday night's Obama fundraiser protest in San Francisco, I saw this sign held by a man from Occupy San Jose:

"I'll believe Corp's are people when [San Jose] City Hall evicts one"

I explained to the protester that corporations are evicted if they don't pay their rent. That was news to him.

On the same theme, there is this sign from Occupy San Francisco (photo taken last October):

"I'll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one! -- I am the 99%"

Of course, corporations are executed, mercilessly, all the time: it is called Chapter 7 (liquidation).

At times, when dealing with people, logic is just irrelevant. In this case, in my opinion, the Occupy crowd is not expressing a legal theory about corporations; they are expressing emotional frustration with life. If conservatives/libertarians are going to respond effectively to their points, we need to address the emotion and not the logic.

PREVIOUSLY on the Occupy Wall Street movement:
•Occupy Wall Street analyzes the Greek debt problem
•"Occupy CPAC" protesters paid $60/day
•Occupy Portland mob smashes windows
•Occupy Portland blocks bridge, causes massive traffic jam
•Occupy Oakland: the devolution
•Occupy Portland explains its rape policy
•News media report on terrorists and patriots
•Occupy Portland protester loses it in front of KGW news
•Occupy Portland and Michael Moore's hypocrisy
•A Visit to Occupy San Francisco: photo essay
•Occupy Oakland and Marxism: a video

Tea Party Protests Obama in San Francisco

San Francisco's Nob Hill was home to many of the famous 19th century "robber barons," the crony capitalists of their day. So it is natural that Pres. Obama would hold fundraisers there. Thursday (yesterday) afternoon, he was at the Marc Hopkins Hotel, a luxury hotel named after a railroad robber baron. In the evening he moved to Nob Hill Masonic Center. The San Francisco Police allowed protesters to assemble along the opposite side of California Street with one section for the Tea Party and one for left-wingers. Hundreds arrived for the Tea Party, seen here standing in front of Grace Cathedral:Here is another view of the Tea Partiers:
The nun, shown above checking text messages on her cell phone, was among those outraged by Obama's decision to require churches to provide abortifacients to their employees.

Good liberals were, of course, incensed that Gov. Brewer would have the audacity to wag her finger at Obama last month. At the San Francisco Weekly, one local reporter, Erin Sherbert, responded with a piece headlined:

Obama Coming to San Francisco, Where Nobody Will Wag Their Fingers in His Face

Naturally, the SF Bay Area Patriots responded by making the theme for this rally to be "wag your finger" at Obama. The red plastic fingers seen below were labeled "Nobama":
The crowd on the Tea Party side, as seen above, was packed shoulder-to-shoulder. The left/liberal/occupy side of the gates was less well attended:
There was a brief flurry of activity on the left side when the pro-marijuana protesters arrived:
By the smell of it, they had been partying before hand. They left not long after they arrived. One can only speculate that, suffering from a case of the munchies, they had to go in search of food.

The occupy group was represented, for example, by this man:
Lastly, this woman, from the Tea Party side, tells Obama to "keep your (lack of) morality off my church":
This protest was organized by the San Francisco Bay Area Patriots and supported by the North Bay Patriots (Marin County) and MyLiberty (San Mateo County).

For many more photos of this event, see Fund47.

Welcome to readers of GatewayPundit, Instapundit, FoxNewsNation, DailyPundit, MelanieMorgan, TheWeepingEagle, IHateTheMedia, Human Events, RCFox, A Shepherd's Voice, AskMarion, The Crawdad Hole, 2012NevadaCounty, The Clue Meter, AmericanPatriots, KnowledgeCreatesPower, CornHusker4Palin, and Gig Harbor Scene.

Racism hypocrisy

Val Prieto writes (hat tip: Instapundit):

So, leftist WaPo Columnist Dana Milbank "inadvertently" mocks latinos by stating "The Chimichanga? It may be the only thing Republicans have left to offer Latinos." And subsequently Obama Campaign Manager Jim Messina tweets that this is "the line of the day" and the twitterverse is afire. Lots of Hispanic folks on the right side of the aisle are insulted by not just the insensitivity of the original remark, but the supporting tweet by none other the the President's Campaign manger.

I can understand why some of us would be insulted. The remarks are definitely insensitive. But there are two things which insult me even more than these statements.

First, the abject hypocrisy of the left, with their holier than thou bullshit with regards to racial and ethnic issues, who have, whether through silence or excuses, defended Milbank and Messina.

Second, and most importantly, the silence from most of our "liberal" Latino brothers and sisters, who have almost collectively stuck their tails between their legs and hidden in a corner and ignored these blatant acts of racial discrimination. As if ignoring this will make it any less egregious or any less insulting or any less real.

Alinsky teaches (PDF) that:

"The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution."

In this case, that means that a perceived racial insult is the issue only when it is useful for attacking Republicans.

Logical consistency is important to conservatives/libertarians. The left has no such limitation.

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin explains it this way:

The P.C. police, as always, are P.C. only when it’s P.E. — politically expedient.

PREVIOUSLY on the subject of liberal hypocrisy:
•A liberal's core beliefs are surprisingly malleable
•Private equity firm hypocrisy at the Obama campaign
•Occupy Portland and Michael Moore's hypocrisy
•President Obama preaches Tolerance
•Dem attack against lobbyists is led by a Dem lobbyist
•Minimum wage and hypocrisy
•UN humanitarian hypocrisy
•Eco-hypocrisy at the UN Climate Change conference
•Dems, taxes, and hypocrisy
•Eco-hypocrite of the day: movie director James Cameron
•Liberal gay bashing
•Poster child hypocrisy
•Eco-hypocrisy: Supermodel Gisele and Prince Charles
•Eco-hypocrisy: Barack Obama
•Eco-hypocrisy: Nancy Pelosi
•The ever-increasing energy use of Al Gore's mansion
•With five private jets, Travolta still lectures on global warming
•Edwards' hypocrisy on the poor
•HuffPost blogger projects enviro-hypocrisy

Occupy Wall Street analyzes the Greek debt problem

At OccupyWallStreet.Org, they are outraged by the unpopular austerity measures being forced on the Greek government:

Wages are to be cut by more than 20 percent, thousands of civil servants will be laid off, and vital social programs will be severely cut. These laws punish the Greek 99% to repay the debts of the ruling class. The government has sold out sovereignty, the poor, and the working class in the interest of foreign creditors and the demands of the 1%. Bankers continue to make millions and corporations pay fewer taxes. The rest of society, having done nothing wrong, is being punished for the failures of the market. [Emph. added]

Is Greece bankrupt because of "the debts of the ruling class"? No. It is bankrupt because of the debts of the Greek government. What has the Greek government been spending its money on? You can find the data (in English fortunately) at the Greek Ministry of Finance. Their 2009 budget is here (PDF). On page 10, there is a helpful pie chart (click on the chart to enlarge):

Greece is bankrupt because it has been spending money that it doesn't have on "health and social policy," "education," and all the other things that left-wing governments spend money on. It is bankrupt because it is a socialist government and it has run out of "other people's money" to spend.

Occupy Wall Street is too busy hating on the "1%" to realize that Greece's problems were caused by politicians buying votes from the "99%".

Social justice defined

From Thomas Sowell:

What do you call it when someone steals someone else's money secretly? Theft. What do you call it when someone takes someone else's money openly by force? Robbery. What do you call it when a politician takes someone else's money in taxes and gives it to someone who is more likely to vote for him? Social Justice.

The Obama first term debt: $70,000 per family

At the Weekly Standard, Jeffrey Anderson examines Pres. Obama's newly released budget

Adding all of this up, deficit spending during Obama’s four years in the White House (based on his own figures) will be an estimated $5.170 trillion — or $5,170,000,000,000.00.

To help put that colossal sum of money into perspective, if you take our deficit spending under Obama and divide it evenly among the roughly 300 million American citizens, that works out to just over $17,000 per person — or about $70,000 for a family of four.

I doubt that very many voters would think that they have received $70.000 in value from Obama's deficit spending.  Add to that that his deficits bring the day of reckoning on Social Security and Medicare ever closer and the pain that Obamanomics will cause is clear to see.

The above assumes that Obama's budget numbers are honest which, in all likelihood, they are not.

Samuel L. Jackson explains how to vote

Not many Democrats feel this free to admit that they are racist (from the NY Post):

Samuel L. Jackson said he voted for President Obama because of his color: “I voted for Barack because he was black. ’Cuz that’s why other folks vote for other people — because they look like them,” the actor says in an outspoken interview in the March issue of Ebony. Jackson sounds off on his feelings for Obama to writer Kevin Powell, saying: “That’s American politics, pure and simple. [Obama’s] message didn’t mean [bleep] to me. In the end, he’s a politician. I just hoped he would do some of what he said he was gonna do. I know politicians say [bleep]; they lie. ’Cuz they want to get elected.” Repeatedly using the N-word, Jackson added that Obama’s philosophical presence had been universally appealing: “When it comes down to it, they wouldn’t have elected a [bleep]. Because, what’s a [bleep]? A [bleep] is scary. Obama ain’t scary at all. [Bleeps] don’t have beers at the White House. [Bleeps] don’t let some white dude, while you in the middle of a speech, call [him] a liar. A [bleep] would have stopped the meeting right there and said, ‘Who the [bleep] said that?’ I hope Obama gets scary in the next four years, ’cuz he ain’t gotta worry about getting re-elected.”

PREVIOUSLY on the subject of liberals' obsession with group identity:
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•Identity group politics in dispute
•Dem Gov says Dem primary voters are sexist and racist
•What is the victim status of your identity group?
•Dems urged to vote their gender
•Liberal logic of group identity

Obama to fund Islamist extremism

Reuters reports:

The White House announced plans on Monday to help "Arab Spring" countries swept by revolutions with more than $800 million in economic aid, while maintaining U.S. military aid to Egypt.

In his annual budget message to Congress, President Barack Obama asked that military aid to Egypt be kept at the level of recent years -- $1.3 billion -- despite a crisis triggered by an Egyptian probe targeting American democracy activists.

Wherever there are enemies to comfort or allies to alienate, Obama will be there.

Related: Obama is paying for Taliban office in Qatar.

PREVIOUSLY on the subject of President Obama's foreign policy problems:
•Amateur hour at the White House
•Alienating allies, II
•Obama's go-it-alone foreign policy
•Obama abandons Eastern Europe
•Appeasing enemies
•Attacking your allies
•Dissing an ally
•Stalinists strongly approve of Obama.

Why conservatives don't trust Romney

Byron York reviews Gov. Romney's speech to CPAC:

He began by joking that he never read Burke or Hayek in college.  "When I was your age, you could have told me they were infielders for the Detroit Tigers," Romney told the students in the crowd.  Instead, Romney said, "My path to conservatism came from my family, my faith, and my life's work."

While liberalism is an emotion, conservatism is a philosophy.  A person who does not appreciate philosophy will not reliably distinguish between approaches to governing which history has shown to succeed and those which are merely politically convenient at the moment.  Romney may have, by Massachusetts' standards at least, conservative instincts.  But, he will never be a conservative.

Medicare spent $2.2 million on penis enlargers

AP reports:

An Illinois man was sentenced Friday by a federal judge in Rhode Island to more than three years in prison for shipping unwanted penis enlargers to diabetes patients as part of a larger fraud scheme that prosecutors say bilked $2.2 million from Medicare over four years.

The fraudster, Gary Winner, bought toys at adult stores for as little as $26 each, repackaged them with information sheets claiming that they helped "bladder control, urinary flow and prostate comfort," and then charged Medicare an average of $284 each. The government spent $2.2 million on the devices before someone discovered a problem.

Soon, the government will be running your healthcare too.

Whitney Houston, RIP

While others cover Whitney Houston's amazing voice and her contribution to pop music, I will just note here that she was a victim of left-wing racism: because her singing appealed to a broad audience, she was accused of not being "black enough." The AP reports:

Her decision not to follow the more soulful inflections of singers like [Aretha] Franklin drew criticism by some who saw her as playing down her black roots to go pop and reach white audiences. The criticism would become a constant refrain through much of her career. She was even booed during the "Soul Train Awards" in 1989.

"Sometimes it gets down to that, you know?" she told Katie Couric in 1996. "You're not black enough for them. I don't know. You're not R&B enough. You're very pop. The white audience has taken you away from them." [Emph. added]

Don't understand what was said? Then it must be racist!

The online newsmagazine Gawker reports that conservatives are racists:

The reporter writes that he "can't understand the lyrics" but that doesn't stop him from hurling accusations of racism.

The video in questions was done by comedian Steven Crowder working with Chris Loesch. Steven Crowder, in revolutionary garb, points to his pants as he uses the word "knickers":

As the election approaches this fall, we can expect the MSM to produce an unending stream of such baseless accusations of racism.

Hat tip: Instapundit and BigJournalism.

The dark ages v. civilization

Writing in Ynet news last December, Guy Bechor describes an under-reported event:

Last Saturday, violent groups of Islamic-Salafi radicals burned the famous scientific institute established by Napoleon in Egypt after its first encounter with the West. Some historians consider it the start of modern times in the Middle East.

The site, L’Institut d’Egypte, held some 200,000 original and rare books, exhibits, maps, archeological findings and studies from Egypt and the entire Middle East, based on the work of generations of western researchers. Most of the artifacts were lost forever, burned or looted.

In the West, it is easy to assume to that every values knowledge and civilization and the benefits thereof. It is not so.

"Occupy CPAC" protesters paid $60/day

Michelle Fields at the Daily Caller interviewed an Occupy CPAC protester. He explained that Sheet Metal Workers Local 100 offered unemployed union members $60 to protest at the Conservative Political Action Conference. The protesters didn't know what CPAC was.

Hat tip: Instapundit, National Review, and TheCollegeFix.

A liberal's core beliefs are surprisingly malleable

Prof. Glenn Reynolds writes:

CHANGE: Oh my: Majorities of liberal Democrats now support drone strikes, keeping Gitmo open.

It’s as if all that international-law, humanitarian, have-you-no-decency crap was just . . . crap. And partisan crap at that.

No secret, but nice to make it clear. To all the people who were yammering about this in 2007-2008: Don’t waste my time in the future. Or yours.

For liberals, it is important to express self-righteous moral indignation. Their feeling of moral superiority is to be taken seriously. The underlying issue is irrelevant.

Related: Michael Walsh writes: "One of the problems the Right consistently has in dealing with the Left is its touching credulity in their stated motives, instead of assessing their genuine objectives."

See also Ace of Spades' essay on moral indignation, racism, and liberal hypocrisy.

Occupy Portland mob smashes windows

(Language warning: liberals speaking)

Chants include "no justice, no peace, fu*k the police!," "all cops are bastards, I see a pig," and "hey, hey, ho, ho, America has got to go!"

The video catches a liberal smashing the window of the Genoa Restaurant. Later, a car window is smashed. Another member of the mob pulls trash cans to the street and dumps them.

How liberalism damages the economy

The city of San Francisco has a lot of advantages, principally climate and beautiful geography. If you are a would-be business owner who wants to bring jobs and services to the city, SF's biggest disadvantage is the city government. The New York Times reviews one woman's effort to open an ice cream shop in beautiful San Francisco:

Ms. Pries said it took two years to open the restaurant, due largely to the city’s morass of permits, procedures and approvals required to start a small business. While waiting for permission to operate, she still had to pay rent and other costs, going deeper into debt each passing month without knowing for sure if she would ever be allowed to open.

“It’s just a huge risk,” she said, noting that the financing came from family and friends, not a bank. “At several points you wonder if you should just walk away and take the loss.”

Ms. Pries said she had to endure months of runaround and pay a lawyer to determine whether her location (a former grocery, vacant for years) was eligible to become a restaurant. There were permit fees of $20,000; a demand that she create a detailed map of all existing area businesses (the city didn’t have one); and an $11,000 charge just to turn on the water.

Hat tip: Instapundit and BoingBoing.

The Kennedy Style

Mimi Alford, a teenage mistress of President Kennedy, describes partying with him at Bing Crosby's desert ranch:

“I was sitting next to him in the living room when a handful of yellow capsules — most likely amyl nitrate, commonly known as poppers — was offered up by one of the guests. The president asked me if I wanted to try the drug, which stimulated the heart but also purportedly enhanced sex. I said no, but he just went ahead and popped the capsule and held it under my nose.”

He didn’t try it himself.

“This was a new sensation, and it frightened me,” Mimi recalls. “I panicked and ran crying from the room.”

Hat tip: Instapundit.

Conservatives do it better

While I was standing in a TEA Party in San Francisco in October 2009, a liberal started a conversation with me. In addition to defending government medicine, he told me repeatedly that liberals have better sex than conservatives. As evidence of his sexual prowess, he explained that he has himself checked once a month for venereal diseases.

Now, Investor's Business Daily reports on a newly released Match.com survey about sex and political affiliation:

The finding: Republicans have the highest rate of orgasm of any group in the report. Especially conservative Republicans. No wonder those tea partiers always look so happy.

In fact, a majority of self-identified conservatives reported that during sex they reach orgasm just about every single time. . . . .

Such a high conservative orgasm rate compares with only 40% reported success for liberal Democrats who, being liberal, talk openly forever about subjects like sex to affirm their liberality.

That makes sense. Certainly, if you had good sex, you wouldn't stand on street corners bragging to strangers about how frequently you test yourself for VD.

Experience is our most valuable teacher, but only if we are willing to learn from it

In the (UK) Telegraph, Janet Daley writes:

The failure of communism should have been, after all, not just a turning point in geo-political power – the ending of the Cold War and the break-up of the Warsaw Pact – but in modern thinking about the state and its relationship to the economy, about collectivism vs individualism, and about public vs private power. Where was the discussion, the trenchant analysis, or the fundamental debate about how and why the collectivist solutions failed, which should have been so pervasive that it would have percolated down from the educated classes to the bright 18-year-olds? Fascism is so thoroughly (and, of course, rightly) repudiated that even the use of the word as a casual slur is considered slanderous, while communism, which enslaved more people for longer (and also committed mass murder), is regarded with almost sentimental condescension.

So why do so many of the world's leaders and thinkers behave as if there were no lessons to learn from the failures of the 20th century?  With over a hundred million people having died as a result of national socialism and international socialism, don't we owe it to them to learn from their sacrifice?

The most common answer that I hear from liberals is that socialism failed because "the wrong people were in charge."  This, of course,  misses the point: in any system involving human beings, there will always be times when the "wrong people" are in charge.  Any sensible system  should be designed to withstand that.  As documented by the Federalist Papers, the US Constitution was drafted by people who understood this well.  Liberals, leftists, socialists, and communists have never understood this or even acknowledged it as a legitimate topic for discussion.  John Hinderaker explains:

[Leftism] has always been based, for the most part, on hate and envy. So when Communism was conclusively proved to be a failure, leftists (including not only leftists in politics, but more important, leftists in the media and in academia) didn’t change their minds or admit their mistake. For in their eyes, while there may have been disappointment, there was no mistake. Their resentments and hatreds remained.

Liberalism is not a philosophy.  It is an emotion.

Environmentalism vs. Anti-semitism

The Jerusalem Post reports that Israel is offering to connect 22 Palestinian villages to its sewage pipe and water treatment system.   Currently, their sewage flows into the aquifer and surface streams.  All but one of the villages refused.  Israel had hoped "that donor countries would agree to only
continue giving the villages financial support if they agree to connect to the
sewage pipeline" but they won't help either.  Apparently, anti-semitism is a much stronger force than environmentalism.

More here.

How many private sector jobs were created?

Everyone is excited about the new employment numbers and the increase of 243,000 non-farm payroll jobs in January.  Does that mean that there are 243,000 more jobs now?  Not actually.  Joyn Crudele at the NY Post explains:

Those 243,000 jobs are the total after seasonal adjustments.

The question you should be asking is, what’s the un-tampered-with number before the adjustment?

Glad you asked. The Labor Department reported a loss of 2,689,000 jobs in January.

Did you catch that? Because the Labor Dept. expected a loss of nearly 3 million jobs but only 2.7 million jobs were lost, it reports a job gain. Now, "seasonal adjustments" are, in principle, a good thing.  When you allow for how the running "seasonal adjustments" have never been very accurate, the adjusted number has little meaning.

Oakland riots continue

The "Occupy Oakland" crowd again battled police earlier this week. The protesters throw rocks and bottles. The police respond with rubber bullets, tear gas, and smoke bombs. This video was taken January 28 by an Occupy sympathizer:

The videographer, "brettnchis," explains that the protesters were trying "to take the Henry J Kaiser building" and, in the process, tore down a fence. Estimates are that the Occupy protests have cost the city of Oakland over $3 million.

It is just like the TEA party, right?

PREVIOUSLY on the Occupy Wall Street movement:
•Occupy Portland blocks bridge, causes massive traffic jam
•Occupy Oakland: the devolution
•Occupy Portland explains its rape policy
•News media report on terrorists and patriots
•Occupy Portland protester loses it in front of KGW news
•Occupy Portland and Michael Moore's hypocrisy
•A Visit to Occupy San Francisco: photo essay
•Occupy Oakland and Marxism: a video

Are public schools succeeding?

Austin interviews students at a Washington State high school. Sample:

Question: "Do you know the vice president of The United States?"

Answer: "I don't know who it it's, it's, it's somebody....Bin Ladin."

Watch also as the students expound on how many states there are in the US. Rather than cry, try to laugh:

Public schools: your tax dollars at work.

PREVIOUSLY on the subject of education:
•Paradox: student test scores improve after school budgets are cut
•The great minds of the Ivy League
•Study: teacher's unions are bad for education
•Study: sexist women teachers stunt learning of girl students
•Black students, harassed for "acting white," get $150,000
•Teaching self-esteem backfires
•Education in Korea vs. the US: does "self-esteem" backfire?
•LA pays teachers not to teach
•What teachers learn in teacher's ed.
•Obama promises to throw money at schools
•How to get a job teaching in California even if you are illiterate

Environmentalism inspires more murders

The International Business Times reports:

A 15-year-old boy from Hong Kong stabbed his mother and sister to death because he apparently believed that there were way too many people in the world, and that fewer people would be more environment-friendly, the South China Morning Post reported.

How many more will have to die for this failed ideology?

Updating the Declaration's list of grievances

The US revolution was inspired by England's abuse of power and the US Declaration of Independence contains a list of such grievances. How do they compare with the abuses of power by the current Federal government and by Pres. Obama's administration in particular?

Original: "He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance."

Update: Considering Obamacare and new punitive "environmental" regulations, the original text holds today.

Original: "For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:"

Update: "For unnecessarily delaying approval Colombia, Panama, and Korea Free Trade Agreements."

Original: "For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury."

Update: "For depriving us in many cases of the benefit of trial or even judicial review of governmental confiscations of land." [Think Sackett v. EPA]

Original: "For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments."

Update: Think Obamacare and the Obama administration's various attacks on religion (such as on religious employment and requiring churches to pay for abortions) and no change to the original text is needed.

Original: "For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever."

Update: "For arbitrarily declaring the US Senate in recess so that he could appoint unpopular administrators to positions of unprecedented power."

Original: "He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions."

Update: "He has provided aid and comfort to domestic insurrectionist ["Occupy Wall Street"] and endeavoured to provide arms to foreign drug cartels who are known for merciless slaughter of Americans and foreigners alike."

Dem. Rep. says Rep. Allen West resembles a hyena

After that racist insult, Rep. Jim Moran (D-VA) also claims Rep. Allen West (R-FL) is "not representative of the African-American community" and, therefore, what West says "is of little or no consequence."

What does it mean to "represent your race"? Is it now fair game in the liberal playbook to compare African-Americans to hyenas?

PREVIOUSLY on racism:
•Is it racist to require a photo ID to buy drain cleaner?
•California offers student tutoring but only for students belonging to the right races
•For liberals, "affirmative action" means "keep the Asians out"
•Occupy Portland protesters hurl racist taunts an African American
•Democrat: "Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men"
•The subtleties of White Privilege
•Racist cupcakes
•Is witch doctor image racist?
•Obama ally: "I hate white people...."
•“You can’t vote against healthcare and call yourself a black man.”
•"The city wasn't ready to hire a white police chief."
•A prominent black politician says the white incumbent cannot properly represent black voters.
•San Franciscans discriminate against blacks.
•"He's not black and he can't represent me, that's just the bottom line."

Become a government official, get rich

The LA Times reports that the publicly-owned Los Angeles Coliseum has been paying union officials with suitcases filled with $100 bills.  The payments were allegedly arranged by General Manager Patrick Lynch and Events Manager Todd DeStefano. According to the LA Times the alleged scheme worked like this:

1. Lynch and DeStefano paid union officials over $1 million in cash, sometimes in suitcases, to pay for stagehands or other workers at Coliseum events .  "[T]he Coliseum imposed no controls over whether the money ended up in the right pockets."
2. The event promoters and Coliseum contractors then arranged payments (a) to Lynch in excess of $400,000 and (b) to companies owned DeStefano in excess of $2.2 million.

Are you looking forward to having the government run your healthcare?

Lynch and DeStefano no longer work for the Coliseum and, through their lawyer, deny wrongdoing.

Media hypocrite of the day: Brian Williams

Hat tip: Instapundit.

2 Democrats plead guilty in vote fraud case

The AP reports from Charleston, West Virginia:

Lincoln County Sheriff Jerry Bowman and Clerk Donald Whitten will plead guilty to charges that they attempted to flood the 2010 Democratic primary with fraudulent absentee ballots, becoming the latest southern West Virginia officeholders ensnared by an investigation into election fraud, federal and state officials announced Monday.

Bowman has agreed to plead guilty to a federal conspiracy charge. He is accused of trying to stuff the ballot box in his favor while running for circuit clerk, U.S. Attorney Booth Goodwin and Secretary of State Natalie Tennant said. Whitten will plead guilty to lying to a criminal investigator for Tennant as her office scrutinized the influx of absentee ballots.

Allegations of improper absentee votes had surfaced immediately after the May 2010 primary. A judge that August threw out more than 300 contested absentee ballots, reversing Bowman's initial victory and securing the nomination for incumbent Circuit Clerk Charles Brumfield.

Hat tip: Instapundit.

California rules seem designed to help Democrats who want to stuff the ballot box with fraudulent absentee ballots. Makes me wonder what Bowman did in W. Virginia to get caught.

For honest elections, (1) absentee ballots should be limited to those truly absent on travel and (2) registration and voting should require photo ID. (Related: Is it racist to require photo ID?)

WELCOME to readers of Predictable History, Unpredictable Past.

PREVIOUSLY on the subject of vote fraud:
•Who counts ballots: SEIU union members
•How vote fraud is done in New Jersey
•Obama DoJ: vote fraud helps "increase turnout"
•More vote fraud: New York State
•How to buy a vote
•NJ Dems demand equal rights for fraudulent voters
•Nevada accuses ACORN of 39 felonies
•Three Obama supporters plead guilty
•Another ex-ACORN worker pleads guilty
•An insider's guide to vote fraud
•Vote fraud update
•Absentee ballot and dishonest elections
•Fraud and Deceit in 2004

2012: A New Beginning

Hat tip: Instapundit

PREVIOUSLY on Tea Parties in the San Francisco area:
•Long Strange Trip: Hippies defend establishment; Tea Party protests (Jul 18)
•A Tea Party greets Obama in San Francisco and the left is not happy about it
•Collected photos of this year's San Francisco Tea Party events
•Minutemen vs. May Day protesters in San Francisco
•A tax day Tea Party breaks out in San Francisco's Union Square
•A tax day Tea Party breaks out on the San Francisco Peninsula
•3 in 10 Californians identify with tea party protests
•To protest Obamacare, San Francisco holds a sick-in (Nov. 15)
•A Tea Party greets Obama in San Francisco (Oct. 15)
•Videos of the October 15 San Francisco Tea Party
•San Franciscans speak to Nancy Pelosi (Aug. 14)
•The San Francisco Tax Day Tea Party Protest in Pictures (Apr. 15)
•Farmers protest in San Jose (Nov. 21).
•Tea Party breaks out in Palo Alto (Nov. 21)

Name that religion

NBC and AP report about the verdict in the Canadian "Honor Killings" case without mentioning the "M-word".  They do manage to mention Christianity.

PuffingtonHost deplores "ignorance"

At the HuffingtonPost, Philip Goldberg complains about Rick Santorum's "ignorance":

In the run-up to the South Carolina primary, Rick Santorum continued his record-breaking run of irritating different segments of the American population. This time, the offended were Muslims and followers of Eastern religions. By extension, that would cover just about everyone from the farthest reaches of Asia to the west coast of Africa.

The offending statement, which contains onion-like layers of ignorance too thick to peel away here, was: "I get a kick out of folks who call for equality now, the people on the left, 'Well, equality, we want equality.' Where do you think this concept of equality comes from? It doesn't come from Islam. It doesn't come from the East and Eastern religions. Where does it come from? It comes from the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, that's where it comes from."

My initial reaction to this classic ethnocentrism was a combination of outrage and amusement. Really, is it too much to ask that a presidential candidate in this diverse society have a rudimentary knowledge of religions other than his own, and the decency to at least pretend to respect them?

At this point, Mr. Goldberg should enthrall us with extensive examples of Islam and Eastern Religions shaming the West into accepting their deeply-held belief in equal rights.  But, of course, he doesn't.   Instead he attacks Christianity:

[W]hat is there to say about a sanctimonious politician who is already famous for intolerance extolling equality in the language of in equality, especially when his own religion has demonstrated its commitment to equality with actions ranging from the Inquisition to the stubborn refusal to ordain women?

This, of course, completely misses the point.  No one claims that equal rights or other ideas of morality sprang forth in ancient times in their full modern form with immediate acceptance.  Nevertheless, it is still Western civilization that developed the ideal of equal rights and has been applying it ever more broadly.  Santorum is not my favorite politician, but he has a strong point here and the PuffingtonHost misses it.

Mr. Goldberg is a victim of oikophobia.

Occupy Portland blocks bridge, stops traffic

"We do not forgive. We do not forget." So say the Occupiers in Portland while blocking the Hawthorne Bridge and causing a massive weekend traffic backup. They disperse after the riot police show up:

If you want to win friends and influence people, creating a traffic jam is probably not a good tactic. But then, the left rarely thinks very far ahead.

PREVIOUSLY on the Occupy Wall Street movement:
•Occupy Oakland: the devolution
•Occupy Portland explains its rape policy
•News media report on terrorists and patriots
•Occupy Portland protester loses it in front of KGW news
•Occupy Portland and Michael Moore's hypocrisy
•A Visit to Occupy San Francisco: photo essay
•Occupy Oakland and Marxism: a video

Pres. Obama is not carbon-neutral

Much attention has been given to Pres. Obama's traveling to a "clean energy" event yesterday in gas-guzzling motorcade. This is, of course, not new. Below is my video of Obama's motorcade going to the San Francisco Airport after an October-2009 fund-raiser in the City. Can you count all the vehicles?:

The kicker is that newspapers reported the next day that Obama spent the night in the City. This motorcade, with all its carbon emissions, was just practice.

P.S. Did you include in your vehicle count that there are multiple police vehicles blocking traffic at every cross-street along the path of the motorcade?

When ideology clashes with reality

Gay rights activists are outraged at a gay actress because she says she chose to be gay.  The LA Times reports:

Former “Sex and the City” star Cynthia Nixon says she is gay by “choice” – a statement that has riled many gay rights activitists who insist that people don’t choose their sexual orientation.

Here’s what Nixon, who recently shaved her head to play a cancer patient in a Broadway production of “Wit,” told the New York Times Magazine:

“I gave a speech recently, an empowerment speech to a gay audience, and it included the line ‘I’ve been straight and I’ve been gay, and gay is better.’ And they tried to get me to change it, because they said it implies that homosexuality can be a choice. And for me, it is a choice. I understand that for many people it’s not, but for me it’s a choice, and you don’t get to define my gayness for me.”

It seems to me that gay activists have unnecessarily backed themselves into a corner over this. The case for gay rights should not depend on a claimed lack-of-choice.

More hypocrisy at the Obama campaign

At the Corner, Katrina Trinko writes:

Deputy Obama campaign manager Stephanie Cutter wrote a memo last week blasting Mitt Romney for leading a private equity firm. . . . But apparently Cutter wasn’t always so opposed to private equity firms: she previously worked as a spokeswoman for J.C. Flowers … a private equity firm

Hat tip: Instapundit.

Vaguely related: Hypocrisy, Thy Name Is Kennedy

PREVIOUSLY on the subject of liberal hypocrisy:
•Occupy Portland and Michael Moore's hypocrisy
•President Obama preaches Tolerance
•Dem attack against lobbyists is led by a Dem lobbyist
•Minimum wage and hypocrisy
•UN humanitarian hypocrisy
•Eco-hypocrisy at the UN Climate Change conference
•Dems, taxes, and hypocrisy
•Eco-hypocrite of the day: movie director James Cameron
•Liberal gay bashing
•Poster child hypocrisy
•Eco-hypocrisy: Supermodel Gisele and Prince Charles
•Eco-hypocrisy: Barack Obama
•Eco-hypocrisy: Nancy Pelosi
•The ever-increasing energy use of Al Gore's mansion
•With five private jets, Travolta still lectures on global warming
•Edwards' hypocrisy on the poor
•HuffPost blogger projects enviro-hypocrisy

Affirmative action backfire

The US Supreme Court will soon decide whether to hear Fisher v. University of Texas, a case challenging racial preferences in school admissions. Two of the Amici briefs filed in this case are particularly interesting.  They argue that the effect of affirmative action has been the opposite of intended.  Ed Whelan of National Review writes:

I’d like to highlight a provocative new line of attack on racial preferences made in two of the amicus briefs—one by law professor Richard Sander and journalist Stuart Taylor Jr., and the other on behalf of three members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Gail Heriot, Peter Kirsanow, and Todd Gaziano.

As Sander and Taylor summarize it, “a growing volume of very careful research, some of it completely unrebutted by dissenting work, suggests that racial preferences in higher education often undermine minority achievement.” This research focuses on the so-called academic “mismatch” effect of racial preferences—that is, the effect of placing the recipients of racial preferences in more advanced academic settings than their objective qualifications would warrant.

It is, of course, not surprising that anyone who is overmatched by his academic environment would tend to do poorly compared to others who are well matched for that same environment. (Sander and Taylor note that the “median black receiving a large admission preference to an elite law school … ends up with grades that put her at the 6th percentile of the white grade distribution.”)

But what recent research has discovered, according to the two amicus briefs, is the more striking finding that, across various measurements, the recipients of racial preferences perform worse than similarly qualified minority students attending less elite institutions. For example, mismatched students transfer at a higher rate out of science majors, are less likely to pursue a doctorate, are less likely to become college professors, have lower graduation rates from law school, and have much lower success rates on bar exams. Again, in each case the comparison is to similarly qualified minority students attending less elite institutions, so the broader implication is that racial preferences affirmatively harm many of their intended beneficiaries. [Emph. added]

Jeff Jacoby at the Boston Globe has more on this (hat tip: Instapundit).

PREVIOUSLY on affirmative action:
•California offers tutoring only to those qualified racially
•Asians try to cope with racist university admissions policies
•Justice Scalia on the incoherence of Affirmative Action law
•For liberals, "affirmative action" means "keep the Asians out"
•Liberals oppose even research on the issue of whether affirmative action works
•High school implements race-based punishments for misbehavior

Is it racist to require a photo ID to buy drain cleaner?

CBS reports from Democrat-run Illinois:

CHICAGO (CBS) – A new state law requires those who buy drain cleaners and other caustic substances to provide photo identification and sign a log.

Republican efforts to require photo ID for voting are labeled as a return to the racist "Jim Crow" era (examples are here, here, and here) and provoke outrage. However, don't minorities, the poor, and the elderly need to buy Drano too? Where is the outrage?

WELCOME to readers of Instapundit, the internet's blog of record, and also to readers of Hogewash.

UPDATE: From the comments, Portland, Oregon, a trendy liberal city, requires a photo ID to buy spray paint. Still more racism?

Is DoJ funding ACORN's spinoffs?

How does the Department of Justice spend the settlement money that it receives?  Judicial Watch reports (hat tip: Instapundit):

Judicial Watch has investigated this controversial arrangement and in 2010 sued the DOJ to obtain information about the policy directing big portions of cash settlements from its civil rights lawsuits to organizations not officially connected to the cases. In response to JW’s lawsuit, the DOJ was forced to acknowledge that it has no official guidelines regarding “qualified organizations” that get leftover settlement funds and that it doesn’t monitor how the money is used.  

In the Countrywide case, details of the unscrupulous arrangement are buried deep (page 10 of the 17-page settlement) in the court document where Bank of America’s Countrywide Financial

Corporation agrees to pay to resolve allegations that it discriminated against qualified black and Hispanic borrowers. The lender denies all of the charges, but wanted to end the case and caved into the government’s terms.

Here’s a synopsis straight out of the court settlement; all money not distributed to allegedly aggrieved persons within 24 months shall be distributed to qualified organizations that provide services including credit and housing counseling, financial literacy and other related programs targeted at African-Americans and Hispanics. Recipients may include “non-profit community organizations that provide education, counseling and other assistance to low-income and minority borrowers…”

This language essentially comes from ACORN’s mission statement. [Emph. added]

To summarize, DoJ doesn't know where the money goes but their policy, such as it is, seems written to send it directly to ACORN.  (ACORN, after it became known for support of vote fraud and international-child-sex-slavery, has since reorganized under different names.)

How can it be that the Dept. of Justice spends money without monitoring "how the money is used"?   Shouldn't that be a crime all by itself?

PREVIOUSLY on ACORN:
•Nevada accuses ACORN of 39 felonies
•Another ex-ACORN worker pleads guilty
•The hypocrisy of ACORN and others on minimum wage
•Think about it: When you feel threatened, isn't "Heidi Fleiss is my hero" the first thing you blurt out?
•NY Times kills ACORN story because it would make Obama look bad
•ACORN and vote fraud in Ohio

Democrats and their kool-aid

Ed Driscoll reminds us today of the 909 people who died ("drank the kool-aid") in Guyana on November 18, 1978, at the direction of Rev. Jim Jones. Before moving to Guyana, Rev. Jones preached in San Francisco where, as documented here, he was celebrated for his active support of the Democrat party. Below, for example, is a photo of SF Mayor Moscone and Rev. Jim Jones greeting then VP-candidate Walter Mondale at the airport in 1976:
Rev. Jones was a strong supporter of Moscone and, some say, instrumental in his election as mayor in 1975. Walter Mondale later wrote praise for Rev. Jones.

And here is Rev. Jim jones with another politician he supported, Gov. Jerry Brown:

Who is Rick Santorum?

Rick Santorum is currently popolar as the not-Romney candidate in the Republican presidential contest. He may technically not be Romney but he is certainly not the leader that the Tea Party wanted. For example, here he is in an 8/4/2005 interview with NPR [Hat tip: Cato@liberty] explaining his opposition to to personal autonomy and his support for keeping government "in the bedroom":

One of the criticisms I make is to what I refer to as more of a libertarianish right. You know, the left has gone so far left and the right in some respects has gone so far right that they touch each other. They come around in the circle. This whole idea of personal autonomy, well I don’t think most conservatives hold that point of view. Some do. They have this idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do, government should keep our taxes down and keep our regulations low, that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom, we shouldn’t get involved in cultural issues. You know, people should do whatever they want. Well, that is not how traditional conservatives view the world and I think most conservatives understand that individuals can’t go it alone. That there is no such society that I am aware of, where we’ve had radical individualism and that it succeeds as a culture.

[This statement is in the audio of the interview but NPR, curiously, did not include it in the transcript.]

Later in the interview (c2:27 in the recording), Santorum says that the science classes should be teaching "the problems and holes, and I think that there are legitimate problems and holes, in the theory of evolution."

If Rick Santorum is the not-Romney, then I might rather have Romney.

UPDATE: Here is another instance of Rick Santorum attacking the TEA party and libertarians:

More at LegalInsurrection.